notes-tron

Tron Legacy complaints

I loved Tron Legacy. I saw it three times. It wasn't quite as good as the old Tron, of course, but then old Tron is one of my top 5 movies, maybe #1.

So, as a fan, I'd like to collect some complaints about it. These are not all my ideas; some of these were thought of by other people. Spoiler alert. I'm writing these down hoping that in the future, fans will be able to remake movies.

Computer jokes in Tron: Legacy

The ones I caught were (references to the first movie are excluded):

Ideas for Tron 3

And, some ideas for any potential Tron 3: I think Dilinger's son, and Jem, are both ripe for turning out to be good people/programs. They are both young, and both associated with bad people but haven't actually been directly implicated yet (Jem has a bit of blood on her hands, but she could have been misled). Part of the plot could be about how everyone always suspects and distrusts them, and about their choice to do something good anyway (or possibly, they could have a similar opportunity, and one could choose good and one could choose bad).

The whole ancient legend about how when Castor died, Pollux shared half his life with him so that they could live on alternate days has obvious application here. Also, is Castor evil or just buggy? I'm guessing both. It would be fun if he were debugged by a User and calmed down and seemed to reform and turned out to just be truly evil, and even more dangerous now that he's not crazy. It would also be funny if Pollux turned out to be good and Castor evil, but they looked the same and everyone repeatedly runs away from Pollux because they think he's Castor before he could explain. It wouldn't be explained to the viewers, either, so Castor would keep showing up in times of danger and the good guys would narrowly escape and the audience would think, good thing, and then near the end they'd be trapped and Pollux would explain that he was only trying to help all those other times. Maybe Zeus really was in a sense Castor's "father", not just himself -- maybe Zeus forked? If he forked into two dissimilar (say, opposite) halves, rather than into two copies of himself, his halves would have different checksums than him (but possibly the same as each other, at least if they are truly opposites and you calculated something like the parity) and could then evade the authorities... and no information would be lost if you recombined them. Pollux would be good, but he would still love his brother, of course..

The reference to quantum teleportation was intriging. Perhaps this could be fleshed out into an assertion that the computer world is a reality just as real as the outside world, and that the scanning in of a person from one to the other is identical to quantum teleportation. Some sort of imagined physics along these lines could also explain how it is that Clu expected to bring that huge army and warship to Earth -- you wouldn't expect that little laser in that little room in Flynn's basement to have enough energy to rez that up.

Also, something from Tron I could have profound philosophical consequences; that both users and programs consider the other to "always have a plan". This could mean that each side regards the other as deterministic and lacking free will. In reality, both sides could be deterministic, and free will could be something that depends on your point of view, a la Kant. This could fit in with the quantum teleportation comment in Tron Legacy to provide a fuzzy explanation for why the heck people and programs can appear as humanoids (whose appearance and behavioral mannerisms contains much more information than their program code) and be transferred between the realms; the "soul" of people and programs alike is something like a platonic ideal, a concept that can be expressed in code or in Earth physics (both deterministic state machines running on an underlying platform with access to non-determinism); the expression of the computer world as a detailed world (lots of information) rather than a few lines of code (less information) could be redundant in that there is some sort of spiritual "god" or "reality" function which provides a mapping from the low-information (lines of code) representation to the high-information (programs as seen by a person in the computer world) representation. If this were the case, then one religious dispute could be the uniqueness of God; that is, is there only one way to perceive the programs in the computer world as people on Earth, or are there many, and the transformation that we see is just an accident of fate? And if there are many, will ANY homomorphism do (and the homomorphism could go in either direction), or are there a restricted subset of "meaningful" interpretation functions? See also Permutation City.

The whole religious thoughts in both Tron I and Legacy would make the integration of a small idea that I had the other day relevant: why do say that you "save" a program? Why is this the same word as the way that religious followers are said to be "saved" by a savior? In both cases, you are transferring something (data, soul) from volatile memory to persistent storage...

So, are we gonna Illuminate Alan, or what?

Oh yeah, and Quora could go bad, or come close to going bad. The whole standard plot line about small-town people who have had little exposure to cosmopolitan life becoming intoxicated by fame and fortune. She could refuse to go back to the Grid, thinking it small and unimportant.

randomearths, moebius-style. the scanning laser is a junctor boxes (another moebius word).

idea for a scene: (music: the epic repetitive music near/at the end of the documentary 'Jodorowski's Dune', bubbles floating in space, in each space another version of the scene, the protagonist is trapped and the enemies are closing in, the protagonist is desperately shouting out commands trying to create a turing complete basis (or maybe a lisp interpreter) before the bad guys break in, in the foreground bubble they break in and he or she is cut down in a red laser, now we hear a babble of voices in other bubbles, one by one all the ones we can see are eliminated in arcs of red laser as we slowly zoom out until we can see the curvature of the horizon, but we can still hear voices distantly over the horizon though we cant see any. they complete the incantation, a blue laser rises straight up to the sky and out the sides, making a T, then we see the beginnings of a complex mechanistic structure growing

maybe adapt the scene from holy mountain with the guy climbing through the rainbow tunnel, finding the weird holy man in the rainbow room, the sound effects from j's dune

themes: redemption. creation.

on other random earths, flynn is usually famous, alternately praised as a businessman or programmer or holy man or wacky scientist or deprecated as a businessman or cult leader or sloppy programmer or poor scientist. but in each one he is either known to be dead or at least he hasnt been seen anywhere for a long, long time, and everyone suggests he is indeed dead.

when they go back to the computer world they find it looks like sunlight. you cant go back to nostalgic childhood. loss. but you can create what will become the nostalgia of others. they like it better. you would sentence us to a world of eternal darkness?

the slow ice quote from neuromancer: "`Maybe.' The construct approximated laughter. Case winced at the sensation. `I checked ol'~ Kuang Eleven out again for you, boy. It's real friendly, long as you're on the trigger end, jus'~ polite an'~ helpful as can be. Speaks good English, too. You ever hear of slow virus before?' `No.' `I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that's what ol'~ Kuang's all about. This ain't bore and inject, it's more like we interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn't feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on and the main programs cut in, start talking circles 'round the logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on 'em before they even get restless.' The Flatline laughed."; the bad guy absorbs everyone into a dance by having the other dancers matching their rhythm. it's like "a wrinkle in time" where if you match rhythm with everyone else, you are absorbed. "a wrinkle in time saves nine" meaning use the prime number trick of a wrinkle in time.

a holy man on another randomearth says flynns creation of clu would be considered the height of arrogance there, bc of the danger of exactly what happened; r you so sure you are so good that you think the world should have more of you? what if you are evil? (and the programmers in still other randomearthly speak of insecure monocultures and of not giving root access to untrusted entities)

gotta work in zero knowledge proofs somewhere

redemption and falling from grace: flynns son can go bad, zeuss's girl can go good, zeus is still good, quora can go bad or at least a less good, bad guys from 1st movies son is a nerd who everyone hates and thinks is bad but who is actually good