C.L.U.

I went to see Tron:Legacy last night with Bruce and Phil. Initially I had gone round to Bruce's house to get the server ready for the Lan party next weekend. We managed to pool a lot of spare part that we had lying around to make quite a reasonable server, things are looking good.

Tron:Legacy was interesting, it has been many years since I saw the original so much so I barely remembered the plot. Only the light cycle racing stuck out in my memory. Clearly technology has moved on significantly since the first film. Legacy was a 3D, film which meant the entrance price was £9.80 (plus the cost of 3D glasses if you didn't already have them). I am still unconvinced by 3D. It looked spectacular of course, but after several hours I was glad to take the glasses off. I still see 3D as a bit of a gimmick rather than something which really adds to film. Only Avatar has really impressed me with its depth and ability to immerse the viewer in a 3D landscape. 3D did make the Grid look spectacular, but it would still look impressive in 2D.

beware maybe spoilers

The Grid is an imagining of the world inside the computer. The story starts out with Kevin Flynn explaining the story of the first film to his young son sam, before disappearing. Years later Alan designer of Tron spoke receives a page from Flynn apparently sent from a long closed arcade. Young Sam Flynn goes to investigate only to discover his fathers hidden workshop, where he is sucked into the matrix the grid.

He finds a world where his father is an outlaw living in the nether regions resigned not to fight anymore after his own program C.L.U. a digital copy of him turned against him. Kevin has spent years meditating on his failure to create a virtual world with Quorra. Quorra is the last of a digital race which manifested inside the grid, Kevin saw them as a miracle C.L.U. as a perversion of the perfect world and destroyed them in the great purge.

I think had we have gone to the Imax I might have been slightly snow blind by the end of the film with all the strong colours from the grid!

Throughout the film I kept thinking of Inception. Especially they are both films explore the power of the mind to create alternative realities. In Inception the reality are the dreamworlds, Tron has has digital world of the Grid. Both explore the nature of creating a world, and that our own minds can work against us. In Inception Cobs subconscious works against him, whereas Flynn's obsession with creating a "perfect" world ended up causing genocide.

Both are good films, and both have exception sound tracks. Trons was privider by Daft Punk who arranged an exceptional score. Han Zimmer made the haunting Inception sound track, which added so much to the film. Overall I think inception was a little smarter and more slickly put together. Inception also wins points for being more original, rather than another rehashing of an 80's era film. Tron:Legacy is a very entertaining spectacle film, which managed to have a little more depth than the average action film.