Tron Legacy Keeps the Internet At Bay

Welp, Tron: Legacy is out on Friday, and if you currently exist, chances are you’re going to see it. In the event you don’t exist, there’s probably a hypothetical quantum world where your un-self will see it anyway. This movie’s moistening the loins of geeks the world over, and I’d be hard pressed to imagine you’re not one of them. You’re reading Techi, after all.

With the advances in computing in the last 28 years, you’d have to think that writing Tron 2 would be quite a task – y’know, now that the internet exists and all, the world of Tron would seem to be limitless.

But that’s just what Legacy director Joe Kosinski was looking to avoid. In an interview with Discover, he explains his vision of the Tron world, 3 decades later.

I didn’t want to make a movie about the Internet. That’s kind of a trap. It can make your movie feel dated the weekend after it comes out. I really liked the idea that this was a closed-off system like the Galapagos Islands, where the simulation has been constantly evolving and growing on some server locked away in some hidden place. That way it felt more like a Western: The world is large and expansive, but at the same time, there’s a code or a set of rules you have to follow. If you want to send a message to someone, you can’t just beam it across cyberspace. You have to get on your light cycle and deliver it in person. You understand that there are repercussions in physicality that make it feel as non-virtual as possible.

A digital Galapagos. Awesome. Sort of like the laptop I found on the side of the road a couple weeks ago – running Windows 3.1 and with only a floppy drive, it’s been closed off from the evolution of technology for decades, too. Once I find a power cord for this thing, who knows what kind of Tron-like dystopian civilization I’ll find inside?

Kosinski warns me well, though. “Technology can be a very powerful and useful thing… if left unchecked, it can turn out to be a very dangerous thing as well.”

Maybe I’ll just leave it well enough alone.