Tron City

My review of Sin City is up, but if you’ve read my original post on the subject, you’ve already got the gist of it.

I was reminded of this film last night when my wife decided to watch my DVD copy of Tron (my review).

Wow, talk about your all-digital sets! Everyone hypes Sin City and Sky Captain for their use of completely CGI environments, but Tron did it all 23 years ago. The acting suffers at times — though it’s definitely better than, say, what we see in the Star Wars prequels — but it is amazing to me just how advanced this film was, at least on a technical level, and how almost prophetic some of its themes and images remain. (The final shot, which speeds up an image of city traffic late at night and thereby suggests that modern cities are kind of like computer chips and circuits, predates a similar visual motif in Koyaanisqatsi by one year.)

While Tron‘s Christological and Cold War parallels are many and overt, I strangely enough found myself thinking of Cecil B. DeMille’s second version of The Ten Commandments (my review) when the film reached its climax. DeMille says in an intro to his film that the theme of his movie is whether men are to be “free souls under God” or whether they are to be “ruled by the whims of a dictator” — an obvious allusion to ’50s politics. Tron takes place in a world where an evil program has tried to assert his control over all other programs, and he has set up a society in which programs are punished and scorned for their “religious” beliefs if they believe in their users; so, the parallels to atheist dictators in our own world are pretty clear. And at the end of the film, when the evil program has been defeated, we see multiple I/O towers lighting up all over the world inside the computer; and it struck me that this may, in some way, parallel the American impulse towards a form of divinely sanctioned individualism.

Of course, things would be even more individualistic in Tron‘s world than in DeMille’s world, since, in the place of one God, there would be many users. And for all its Christological elements, Tron actually sets up a scenario that would be very open to something more pagan — it is easy to imagine rival users (or rival gods) pitting their favorite programs (or heroes) against each other.

Let’s put it this way: what would a virus look like in that world? And what, then, would an anti-virus program look like?

Interestingly, the wife and I recently started going through Babylon 5, and I note that at least two of this film’s actors became regulars in that series — Bruce Boxleitner played Tron in one and a commander in the other, while Peter Jurasik played Crom in one (he’s the guy who dies in the gladiator game against Flynn, after Sark pushes the green button) and Londo Mollari (the Centauri ambassador with the peacock hairdo) in the other.