Comment Re:Too Much Imagination Required? (Score 1) 429
... anyone who knows anything about computers can easily see that it's just a thin sheen of technobabble hastily thrown on top of a standard action movie. Props to the guy they got to do the UNIX commands in the real life scenes, but other than that, the tech stuff was so out of this world
That gets to the heart of the difference between Legacy and Tron, and I'm surprised I haven't seen that comment made more widely. Tron's world-inside-the-computer was visually cool, but it also allowed those in the know to geek out a little over how they rendered real computer concepts. Tron had --
- programmes as characters (of course);
- a bit as a minor character (Disnification, sure, but it's true to the core conceit);
- the MCP assimilating other programmes' functions;
- a "game grid" that actually related isomorphically to what was going on in real-world game machines;
- I/O "towers" representing the central importance of control over information.
All of these things were part of the world-inside conceit. In Legacy, by contrast, the only thing remaining is programmes-as-characters. We now get to see that they have code (but why? shouldn't they be binary blobs?), but all of the rest of it has vanished. The game grid has been retained as well, but now it's meaningless! Surely more people have noticed that ALL the computer-geek stuff is in the real world -- NONE of it is inside the machine? As a result, the world inside the machine is nothing more than a cool-looking veneer over a generic and dull fantasy setting.
Now, the game Tron 2.0 (by contrast, again) absolutely nailed the core idea. It added nifty mechanics like permissions, viruses, and code optimisation; missions that involved things like getting through a firewall, hacking servers, compiling code, escaping from a HDD format, and getting a PDA to do what you tell it by draining its battery.
Both sequels looked cool. But the sequel that really carried on the cool ideas in the original is to be forgotten, alas. Instead we've got the utterly unengaging fantasy realm as "canon". Sigh.