Tron 3 is coming (and Garrett Hedlund is confirmed to come back)

It will be interested to see were they go with that. Obviously the whole movie won't take place in the real world. Maybe inter-cutting between the real world and the grid?

 

Totally agree...like how would a "cloud program" exist in a way we could visualize (where the old programs seem to travel in the computer system....this would be like a literally web!).



Also (for others complaining), I actually liked Sam Flynn's character...he actually made sense. Being a rich kid with no dad, he lives a reckless lifestyle...but being a Flynn, is smart enough to understand computers. It makes A LOT of sense that he can kick butt in the virtual world. He might need a "fun" sidekick to add some more humor to the movie...

 

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Yes!
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I hope they don't do that. The appeal of the Tron franchise is the grid. While I'm interested in seeing how Quorra adjusts to the real world, that shouldn't be the focus on any level. See some of it in the beginning of the film and then delve back into the grid.

Perhaps Beck somehow survives Tron: Uprising to help out?

 

I don't disagree with that. My point is, I am not sure if they put much thought into that ending. The only real arc is for her to return to the grid. If they go back to the grid without her, it makes the last movie kind of pointless.

Maybe she becomes a user herself. With a her own program that represents her.

 

I'm guessing we could see Sam and Quorra in the real world at the start of the film doing whatever it is that is supposed to "transform" humanity, and then whatever plan the Dillinger's are attempting to execute (based on their little next conversation in one of the viral videos) perhaps affects the Grid and the two of them have to go back. Remember we saw Rinzler switch his colours from orange back to Blue implying that he finally remembered he was Tron. We also saw Alan recruit Ram who was behind the Flynn Lives campaign in the Tron'Verse. I wouldn't mind if Beck was the second Tron or whatever since that is is what Tron is training him to be in the series (I've not been watching fully so pardon me if I got that incorrect). I really can't wait until we start getting plot details. The script for Legacy went through several drafts before Disney finally green lit something they were happy with so I kind of expect the same sort of process to happen with this one. Only difference is that now that they have the seeds of potential ideas to play around with now.

 

^ Ram's user also appeared in the original film, didn't he? Wasn't he the guy who asked Alan for some of his popcorn?

 

I think that was in "Tron 2.0". Don't remember if that happened in the film or not.

 

Nearly all the human versions of the programs in the original Tron were seen, I remember that Sark's second in command was the same guy who was Dillinger's briefly seen human assistant.

 

Right. According to IMDb:

Jeff Bridges: Kevin Flynn/Clu
Bruce Boxleitner: Alan Bradley/Tron
David Warner: Ed Dillinger/Sark/Voice of MCP
Cindy Morgan: Lora Baines/Yori
Barnard Hughes: Walter Gibbs/Dumont
Dan Shor: "Popcorn Co-Worker"/Ram
Tony Stephano: Peter (Dillinger's assistant)/Sark's Lieutenant

The only significant "program" character whose counterpart wasn't seen in the real world was Crom (Peter Jurasik).

There was one other actor who played a dual role, Loyd Catlett as "Conscript #1/Video Game Cowboy," but I'm not sure those were meant to be the same kind of program/programmer pairing.

 

That was the guy playing the light cycle game at the beginning, I think. I guess the player in the arcade game is considered the 'user' of the character in the game (the light cycle player who's killed by Sark).

 

This is good news, cant wait.

 

Well, that's weird. Why would the cycler have the essence of just some random player rather than the programmer? I thought I had the cosmology worked out here -- the creation imbued with part of the spirit of the creator -- but this confuses things. Do programs change appearance and personality depending on who's running them at a given moment?

(Yes, I know, I'm overthinking it. But that's part of the fun.)

 

The quarter the guy put into the machine transferred some of his essence into the program!

Obviously.

 

^Which would have staggering theological/economic implications...

 

More than Quorra, a spontaneously-created life form that someone got actualized intoan (apparently) human body, popping into real life?

I do hope they address whether or not she is in fact human, quickly in Tron 3 . I actually like the idea that she's just made up of artificial stuff somehow, and not flesh and blood. That way, blow up doll makers everywhere in the world can explode with the possibilities...

Mark

 

Well, that's a whole different topic of discussion. As I said earlier, the two movies took very different views of the Grid; in the original, it was more of a magical approach in which the programs created by the human characters were like tiny little versions of their creators -- the idea of computer programs filtered through an anthropomorphic fantasy metaphor. But the sequel came along in an era where computers were more everyday and less prone to being interpreted magically, so the whole thing was presented from a science-fictional perspective, in which the Programs were AIs created by Flynn. Although Legacy pretends to be a sequel, it's actually a complete refashioning of the premise, approaching it as science fiction rather than fantasy. So the theological/"soul" questions I was joking about before doesn't apply to the issue of the Isos in Legacy/Uprising, because they're simply a matter of AI evolution, spontaneously emerging sentiences within a computer network created to host such sentiences, rather than pieces of programmers' souls somehow mystically imbuing the programs they wrote.

 

Interesting thought... While Sam is digitised and transported into the Grid, he retained his humanity, thus his ability to bleed... So then would the true be same for Quorra but in reverse... If she gets cut, will she partially de-rez like she did in the bar fight? And would the same be true for actual programs, given that she's something different? And can programs be fixed the way Kevin fixed her? Hmmmm...

 

Really, Quorra (and Clu's army) shouldn't have been able to materialize in the physical world at all. According to Dr. Gibbs's explanation in the original film, the laser disintegrator device worked pretty much exactly like a transporter: It broke down the particles in the body while scanning the pattern as computer data, stored the particles, then reassembled them at a new location according to the recorded pattern. In Flynn's case, the particles of his physical body were presumably just held within the device's "pattern buffer" while his information data were downloaded into the network to interact with the Programs. When he was brought back out again, his original particles were reassembled according to their proper pattern.

Now, okay, since Kevin Flynn had gone in before Sam, and since Sam returned with Quorra instead of Kevin, and since Jeff Bridges significantly outmasses Olivia Wilde, we can assume that, if Kevin's particles were still stored in the buffer after all these years, then even if a certain percentage of the particles had escaped containment, there would've still been enough of them left to assemble into a physical body for Quorra even after Sam's own particles had been reassembled. But since only two human beings had been scanned into the Grid, only two, more or less, could come out again. So what would the source of matter have been for the army of physical bodies and vehicles that Clu intended to materialize in the physical world? There shouldn't have been any way for that to happen, under the rules established in the original film. Contrary to the change in how the Programs were interpreted, this is something that the original movie handled less fancifully than the sequel. The original stayed true to conservation of mass, but the sequel forgot how the teleporter was supposed to work and treated the conversion of data to physical form as pure magic, without any regard to the matter source.

Not to mention -- why did Clu even need to go into the physical world? The MCP in the original was this close to conquering the entire world by taking over its computer networks and controlling the world's nuclear arsenals (in essence, becoming Skynet). The world today is far more dependent on computers than the world then. The writers of Legacy really missed a trick here. Clu's plan shouldn't have been this nebulous thing about materializing a bunch of soldiers and weapons and starting an invasion. That's not how you conquer the world in this day and age. All he needed was to find a way to connect Flynn's isolated Grid to the Internet, and he could've conquered the world without needing to materialize anything.

 

The Shiva laser assembly in the arcade basement had four tanks of raw elements that could be used to construct objects - the matter wasn't coming from nowhere. The tanks can evidently be seen in the film itself.

Obviously, not explicitly stating this on screen is an oversight and leads to confusion. But I believe the same topic was discussed in the production materials and by people who worked on the film.

FYI, one theory about Clu's ultimate plans goes with the strategy of: Clu personally materializes in the real world, impersonates Kevin Flynn with some miraculous explanation for his youthful appearance, and takes control of Encom's huge bankroll to do as he pleased.

As for Quorra's nature in the real world, obviously we have to wait and see. But there has been a huge amount of speculation to the effect that the "digital DNA" of the ISOs is based on human DNA, having been generated from the Grid itself, possibly influenced by Flynn entering it as the only human. In effect Flynn's pattern leaking into the Grid. Therefore, when Quorra is reconstructed in the real world, the pattern exists in her to make use of the laser's reserve supply of matter to allow a human body to fall into place. Her DNA however, is probably very unusual. It has been speculated that the way in which she is important could be medical: ISOs don't appear to age or suffer diseases. What if Quorra's DNA is a pattern for a humanlike being that is immortal and immune to all disease and illness?

Here's some more fun speculation that I personally am fond of related to how Legacy has retconned the Tron universe. Essentially, the "electronic world" is a real place, a dimension in some kind of subspace that energy interacts with and is capable of imprinting structure onto. Until the advent of high technology, this dimension was essentially a chaotic, mostly blank realm. Then devices like electric grids and electronic circuits superimpose a kind of structure and order. The human mind itself may even help shape it, being comprised of electrical impulses. Therefore in the original film, the focused concentration of a programmer while writing a program actually does imprint something in the electronic world; an echo, but just enough to make the program resemble its creator if the focus was very personal. As much earlier computer programming and experimentation was.

In Legacy, Flynn takes intentional advantage of this phenomenon to purposefully design a virtual world rather than merely allowing one to spring up as a natural byproduct of a computer operating. At one point, there's a reference to Flynn babbling about "quantum teleportation"; suggesting perhaps that the Shiva laser is an ahead-of-its time discovery allowing a connection to this subspace electronic world. This entire framework also eliminates the problem with a late 80s computer system being able to simulate such a detailed virtual world. It isn't. It's just running a basic program that lays out the literal "grid" of the Grid, along with instructions for a simulation of physics at the level of detail Flynn desired. The natural effect of this strange quantum/subspace dimension does the rest, extrapolating a solid, coherent world out of some very basic principles. (Not unlike... the real world.) Funny enough, the art direction of Legacy as a film seems to go along with this - the further you get from the cities on the Grid, source of power and organization, the more reality breaks down into fractal chaos. First undifferentiated fractal "earth". Then eventually a fractal sea. The portal out of the Grid, situated far away at the "end of the world" is surrounded by abstract floating chunks of matter and dark mist.