Tron: What do the different colors mean?

[Christopher]

That's another thing Legacy changed/misinterpreted from the original. Kevin Flynn didn't want information to be free and open-source. Just the opposite -- he wanted to reclaim his stolen intellectual property and the enormous profits from it that should've been his all along. Sure, in-story he wanted programs to be "free," but in the sense that he wanted them to be controlled by their individual programmers rather than taken by the company. This was before ubiquitous personal computing, after all, so computers and programs were mainly in the hands of people who worked as programmers, not in the hands of the general public. So Flynn's mission, and Tron's parallel/allegorical mission, wasn't about open-source software versus copyrighted/for-sale software, but about labor versus management, about individual creators being entitled to control and profit from their own creations rather than having to surrender them to their employers. (A theme that I believe had some resonance to the filmmakers working within the Disney corporate empire.) Flynn's goal was for himself and the other programmers to have the right to make money from their own work. So when his son in Legacy made Encom's newest software available to everyone for free, thus depriving its developers of income, he wasn't standing up for Kevin Flynn's ideals, but betraying them.

[sojourner]

Did anyone else think that Sam bleeding while in the grid didn't make much sense?

[CorporalCaptain]

sojourner wrote:

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Did anyone else think that Sam bleeding while in the grid didn't make much sense?

As opposed to what other parts of the premise?

No, seriously. Even more than for the first film, my brain had to be set to park for me to get anything whatsoever out the sequel. I actually enjoyed the first film....

[sojourner]

The fact that him having blood inside the grid doesn't really follow the premise.

[Christopher]

sojourner wrote:

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The fact that him having blood inside the grid doesn't really follow the premise.

Why not? The premise in both movies is that the lead character was scanned and dematerialized and the data defining his physical form -- his "transporter pattern," which is actually a pretty close analogy for the technology -- was downloaded into the Grid. Which implies that his Grid self was an exact simulation of his physical self right down to the last detail.

[Nick Ryder]

That's what I was thinking - that Sam and his old man before him were basically "replicated" in the Grid - so if they were cut - they bled. If they died, they died, they didn't de-rez

[Morpheus 02]

Christopher wrote:

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That's another thing Legacy changed/misinterpreted from the original. Kevin Flynn didn't want information to be free and open-source. Just the opposite -- he wanted to reclaim his stolen intellectual property and the enormous profits from it that should've been his all along. Sure, in-story he wanted programs to be "free," but in the sense that he wanted them to be controlled by their individual programmers rather than taken by the company. This was before ubiquitous personal computing, after all, so computers and programs were mainly in the hands of people who worked as programmers, not in the hands of the general public. So Flynn's mission, and Tron's parallel/allegorical mission, wasn't about open-source software versus copyrighted/for-sale software, but about labor versus management, about individual creators being entitled to control and profit from their own creations rather than having to surrender them to their employers. (A theme that I believe had some resonance to the filmmakers working within the Disney corporate empire.) Flynn's goal was for himself and the other programmers to have the right to make money from their own work. So when his son in Legacy made Encom's newest software available to everyone for free, thus depriving its developers of income, he wasn't standing up for Kevin Flynn's ideals, but betraying them.

that's was Kevin's 1982 philosophy...by within a few years, he already had plenty of money, and was working on his own little world. And didn't the ISO's appear BEFORE he got trapped? If so, by that time (and when Sam was old enough to comprehend stories), Kevin's attitude toward money might have changed.

At that point, money was nice, but not the end all (as opposed to livin large CEO of 1983).

And certainly Sam had lived his whole life WITH lots o money, and saw how meaningless it was (which led him to his daredevil liestyle..which to me, really made his "action hero" stunts in the Grid believable to me). i think Daddy Flynn would understand, especially if it seemed lke the Corporate attitude had come back into power (as it apparently had; Sam had controlling interest, but a typical Corporate exec ran the day-to-day, and in effect EnCom as the "true" CEO)

So by 1992, Sam was taught a certain philosophy of life, and the 2010 Sam probaby was indeed going the way his father intended (adjustng for the fact that Dad was gone during even more formative years of high school and college).

[Christopher]

Sure, you can rationalize it in-universe, at least within the context of the sequel's universe. I'm looking at it more metatextually, thinking about the differences in intention between the original filmmakers and the sequel's filmmakers. See, I waited to see Legacy until I could get my hands on a copy of the original, so I could watch them on consecutive days. And that turned out to be a mistake, because it just highlighted all the differences in concept and approach between the two. Back to back, the two films just don't feel like they go together. The changes were kind of jarring.

But you make a good argument. Maybe in the future I'll have a higher opinion of Legacy. But I'm not sure it lives up to its name. It's too revisionist, too different in approach, to really feel like it's carrying on the legacy of the original.

[Morpheus 02]

Christopher wrote:

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Sure, you can rationalize it in-universe, at least within the context of the sequel's universe. I'm looking at it more metatextually, thinking about the differences in intention between the original filmmakers and the sequel's filmmakers. See, I waited to see Legacy until I could get my hands on a copy of the original, so I could watch them on consecutive days. And that turned out to be a mistake, because it just highlighted all the differences in concept and approach between the two. Back to back, the two films just don't feel like they go together. The changes were kind of jarring.

But you make a good argument. Maybe in the future I'll have a higher opinion of Legacy. But I'm not sure it lives up to its name. It's too revisionist, too different in approach, to really feel like it's carrying on the legacy of the original.

I last saw Tron at least 15 years ago, maybe longer. So i have the memories of a 10 year old seeing it, and the decades-long anticipation of a new movie, similar to my anticipation to new Star Wars movies.

But having that comparison, Legacy definitely felt more in line of what I remember with the original, and actually more "mature" than I remmeber the first. Contrast to The Phantom Menace, which felt lke a let down, with a child Anakin and goofy Jar Jar.

Legacy didn't have such silliness to deflate my anticipation.

That probably won't change your viewing of Legacy in the future -- but hope you understand my (and others) appreciation of Legacy.

[Christopher]

^Well, sure, you're exactly the target audience the film was made for -- people who vaguely remembered the original but weren't fresh on its details. Like I said, the reason Legacy was problematical for me was because I chose to see it the day after I rewatched the original. It's a sequel that works better at a significant remove. In fact, it wasn't easy for me to get my hands on that DVD of the original; they didn't have it on Netflix and I had to wait until the library's copy was available. I seem to recall that Disney intentionally made the original unavailable until after Legacy came out, almost as if they didn't want people comparing the two directly. At least, they wanted Legacy to stand on its own.

[sojourner]

I've had one of the special editions of Tron for a good number of years. It was interesting after watching the "making of" dvd that came with it before going to see Legacy. Some of the character designs in Legacy bear striking resemblance to some unused art from Tron.

Heck, when you think about it Legacy is a pretty close beat - for - beat retelling of Tron.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Christopher wrote:

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I just interpreted that as them typing program instructions into their computers. They spoke them aloud because that's what characters do in movies and TV to accommodate the audience -- they read aloud, they say what they're typing, etc.

But in both cases, Flynn and Alan speak to their programs in normal conversational English. And Alan even mentions Tron's identity disc, which is something that no one in the real world should even know about...

[CorporalCaptain]

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

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But in both cases, Flynn and Alan speak to their programs in normal conversational English. And Alan even mentions Tron's identity disc, which is something that no one in the real world should even know about...

Imagine there's something like a universal translator operating....

[sojourner]

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

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And Alan even mentions Tron's identity disc

He does? I don't recall that.

[Kronos]

Nick Ryder wrote:

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What if there IS man... what if inside our laptops there's little glowy suited people running around living their lives. Far out stuff man.

So..every time we reboot we kill them?

Time to reboot