TRON Reconsidered

I didn’t love TRON when I first saw it in theaters. Mostly because I’d had enough programming at the time to understand that, “This is not how computers work.”  Partly, too, because the movie is deliberately weird.

Alas, I missed some of the film’s subtler themes.

TRON is a bit of a Frankenstein story, and although the writers eschewed what would be a primary plotline for modern audiences — the horrors of machine learning — in order to give more time to the visual aesthetics and the overall action elements of what became a landmark 1980's-style action/science-fantasy flick, that “be careful what you build” element is still very much alive in the final movie.  Doubling down on action was probably the right choice back in 1982, but just so we’re clear, I missed the subtler stuff at age 10, and that stuff is still important overall.   Instead, I let my misinformed frustration with the way the film handled programming pull me out of the story, and that ruined it for me when I saw TRON in theaters.

Or maybe the movie and its themes just make more sense in 2019.  Genius ENCOM programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) writes a bunch of brilliant video games but gets fired, and six months later, he watches helplessly as ENCOM begins releasing his games under the byline of another programmer, ENCOM’s now-director Ed Dillinger.  It’s implied but never directly stated that Dillinger also stole Flynn’s true work of genius, an independent artificial intelligence system that Flynn designed primarily to play high-level chess.  Dillinger himself then reconfigures the artificial intelligence to serve as the Master Control Program (MCP) for ENCOM’s mainframe. The reconfigured MCP becomes capable of true machine learning and slowly starts to slip its leash. Alas, this fundamental story component gets explained so quickly in the film that viewers at the time didn't always catch it -- I didn't catch it -- leading to a lot of negative reviews and overall confusion surrounding the film’s plot. Regardless, the MCP starts consuming and incorporating external programs across ENCOM’s mainframe, and by the time our story opens on-screen, it has also started independently hacking and incorporating programs outside its native system, including programs at the Kremlin and at the Pentagon.

So yeah. This could have been The Matrix, circa 1982. That's not the way the filmmakers played it at the time, but the basic story elements were mostly already there.

Here I must admit that although my 10-year-old self had a reasonably advanced understanding of BASIC programming, I didn’t have much knowledge of information architecture, database design, or computer communication schemes via MODEM. This is important because ENCOM’s MCP runs on a mainframe, which can be accessed remotely from any number of dummy terminals throughout the system. Dummy terminal design was common in the early 80’s for industrial uses, but it fell out of favor when personal computers became common. TRON was itself released against the backdrop of the PC revolution, which perhaps added to the confusion surrounding the movie's plot. Dummy terminal design is back now via web-based apps like Google Docs or Office 365 -- we access those programs remotely via our PCs, but they’re actually running on centralized mainframes at industrial server farms via the Internet -- but my experience as a 10-year-old extended just as far as floppy disks and independent personal computers. TRON’s talk of data ports and up-links confused me to the point that I actually disliked the movie itself. Alas, I wasn't the only one. Nevertheless, it would’ve made sense to those who knew enough to understand mainframe design. That wasn’t a lot of folks, unfortunately.

Worse, all of this actually matters to the story. The MCP is itself becoming simultaneously self-aware and megalomaniacal.  It begins independently gobbling up programs to grow itself and it’s capabilities while locking users out of the mainframe to protect its control of the system. Flynn and his programmer buddy Alan (Bruce Boxleitner) therefore want to hack the MCP, though for different reasons. Flynn wants to prove that ENCOM stole his games. Alan simply wants to debug his office mainframe because he sees that the Master Control Program has gotten out of control.  TRON turns out to be the name of a control program Alan himself has written as a means of stopping the MCP.

Anyway, the MCP shoots Flynn with a laser, thereby sucking him physically into the mainframe architecture, and wackiness ensues.

As I said, a 2020 version of TRON would undoubtedly focus on the horrors of Master Control becoming a self-aware computer program. In fact, TRON: Legacy gets quite a bit of this with talk of both the hubris of creators and the spontaneous development of true artificial intelligence and/or artificial life.  In 1982, however, the original TRON existed as a straightforward sci fi/action flick with an emphasis on appearance and visual design. It’s amazing to look at, but no one in the film spends any time worrying about The Matrix, for better or worse. That's not actually a problem in this particular story, but there's a lot more there than what makes it onto the screen itself.

As you’ve probably guessed, I really enjoyed the re-watch. I liked it much, much more as an adult than I did as a kid. I kind of wish the filmmakers had spent more time building out the cultural environment of the machine world -- and indeed, they do spend more time with this in Legacy -- but what we got was still truly amazing.

Post-Script 

I watched TRON: Legacy again last night to see what else I missed, and I’m sorry to say that I didn’t think much more of that second film the second time around.  I liked it okay, but part of what made TRON unique was the flat, deliberately digital feel of the original machine realm.  They mostly did away with that in Legacy, leaving it feeling just halfway alien.  That was a mistake.

From Legacy.  Highly stylized by distinctly three dimensional.

The other issue occurs because of story design.  Flynn has designed an incredible information architecture system, but he did it back in 1989, so it never got plugged into the Internet.  This is the origin of the film’s central conflict, i.e. Flynn’s disappearance, but it leaves the stakes of the film itself distinctly lower than they would have been had we seen some kind of renewed Master Control Program seeking to take control of the entire world’s information architecture.

In that sense, the first film had much higher stakes.  This second one left me thinking critically about how matter can be neither created nor destroyed.  As when I was 10, that pulled me repeatedly out of the story.