Legacy Technology

Being a child of the 70s and 80s, it should come as no surprise that I was fascinated by TRON. There was a film that showed us life inside computers… Some characters even had computer-y names (the ill-fated sidekick, RAM, and of course TRON himself, the name being a contraction of the command ‘TRace ON’). Sure it was hokey, naïve and two-dimensional… but, to a youngster like myself, it all seemed plausible that, while we play our videogames, little ‘people’ inside the computer are actually experiencing these games from the inside, living and dying by our hands. It was the world's first true glimpse of the Digital... and is still seen as a milestone and an impressive, iconic feat of comparatively limited technology, even 28 years later.

And so it came to pass that, 28 years later, there would be a sequel, TRON Legacy.

But could it be that 28 years is too long a wait? At first glance, the movie looks awesome. Those same digital environments refined, upgraded, texture-mapped... The glowing costumes are more impressively rendered, the light cycles are smoother, almost organic, yet seemingly made of glass... The clunky helmets are absent... The girls are sexier...

And it's going to be in IMAX 3D.

Consider this:
Over the course of those intervening years, technology in every aspect of our life has taken a massive leap forward. In videogames alone, we have environments far in advance of those portrayed in TRON. The average home computer could create something with more detail than anything seen in TRON. There was even a 2003  videogame 'sequel', cleverly named TRON 2.0, which ably demonstrated that a videogame could upgrade every visual aspect of the original movie.

The world of the Digital has been redefined almost daily. The internet has created an environment infinitely larger and more complex than anything the Master Control Program could have envisaged... and a kids TV series called ReBoot examined and explored that environment in impressive detail for its time. Anime, like Ghost In The Shell or Serial Experiments: Lain have further reinterpreted Online, and The Matrix showed us a Virtual Reality so real, it fooled and enslaved the population of the planet.

Videogames have become vastly more complex than any of the gladiatorial challenges shown in TRON - how can the monochromatic landscapes of Legacy hope to represent anything of World of Warcraft, or The Sims? Light cycles may be cool, but why play a fancy upgrade to Snake, when you can play the latest immersive first-person game on XBox, PS3 or Wii?

So, much as I am looking forward to TRON Legacy, I have to wonder how relevant it will be to today's audiences. Will someone who has never seen the original understand its landscapes and its rules? I have to wonder why it was even attempted after such a long time, and why Kevin Flynn's world of the Digital is such a small upgrade on the original.

I guess it kinda boils down to "Do we really need a sequel to TRON?"

But I'm looking forward to it. Honest.