REVIEW: TRON Legacy delivers strong identity-technocracy message

Tron sequel distills the nature of "bad" societal code

BTC - While taking a break this Christmas, I was drawn into and captured 3 times by the world of TRON Legacy (regular, 3D, & 3D IMAX). I found what I believe to be true about the power of cyberidentity staring back at me from the screen.

Disney’s TRON Legacy amazingly demonstrates the drama of gotham’s Big Tech sectors and the ongoing power strains of its inverted political society. The movie is strikingly current, as it opens with disaffected twenty-something & heir-apparent, Sam Flynn, on a mission to carry out an ethical hack to the dismay of estranged corporate board members.   Flynn “Junior” in TRON Legacy is posed as the human 2.0 version of his disappeared father, Kevin Flynn. The Son of Flynn obviates the younger class of tech geniuses who move out wildly popular social networks and web applications. Some have personal loyalties and a robin-hood sense of justice; while others fall in line towards self-service and the status quo. Flynn Jr.’s journey ahead is to adopt responsibility for the deep problems of “the machine” as it currently exists.

Sam follows a prompt by one of the board members to return to his father’s video arcade. Through exploratory events he finds himself dropped onto his father’s dark, tech grid world. He is picked up immediately by a Recognizer for the first offense of being unidentifiable. Later Sam, assumed to be a program, is given an identity disk. He is informed that if he is found without his disk, he may be “derezzed”; which is to be deleted or killed by the system. He survives a sentence to play the Program Games after he is discovered by Tron, a character devoted to the user. He then becomes hunted, known as The Son of Flynn.

"If you lose your disk, or fail to follow commands, you'll be subject to immediate deresolution."

TRON Legacy shows us the drama of a utopian technocracy gone totalitarian; including exile, political imprisonment, a high-level coup and genocide. Kevin Flynn, portrayed immaculately by Jeff Bridges, is an evolved California tech-zen guru who became a prisoner of the game he built. CLU, Kevin Flynn’s digital avatar, operates an absolute rule of technology against the indecisive, imperfect needs of vulnerable users. The Son of Flynn confronts the perils of being on the downside of power amid digital sycophants, tyrants, and innocent victims of his father’s grid world gone rogue. The film exhibits subtleties of human interplay towards singularity; where once useful, companionable relationships with technology turn into a struggle for power over the user base of humanity, power over identity is GOD and anonymity a crime.

TRON Legacy suggests that technology will mimic hidden flaws of human logic and the arcane dangers of perfection we may not be able to escape unless we evolve spiritually. It seems as if our human evolution has yet to break through and ethically catch up to pace of our gadget development. If technology tends to be running your life, with or without you - take a break and go see this film.

ALSO: The "score" on the Tron Legacy Motion Picture picture soundrack