{"id":2911,"date":"2005-04-01T10:08:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-01T10:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/04\/tron-city\/"},"modified":"2005-04-01T10:08:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-01T10:08:00","slug":"tron-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/04\/tron-city.html","title":{"rendered":"Tron City"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

My review<\/a> of <\/span>Sin City<\/a><\/i> is up, but if you\u2019ve read my <\/span>original post<\/a> on the subject, you\u2019ve already got the gist of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was reminded of this film last night when my wife decided to watch my DVD copy of <\/span>Tron<\/a><\/i> (<\/span>my review<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Wow, talk about your all-digital sets! Everyone hypes Sin City<\/i> and <\/span>Sky Captain<\/i> for their use of completely CGI environments, but <\/span>Tron<\/i> did it all 23 years ago. The acting suffers at times \u2014 though it\u2019s definitely better than, say, what we see in the <\/span>Star Wars<\/i> prequels<\/a> \u2014 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 <\/span>Koyaanisqatsi<\/a><\/i> by one year.)<\/span><\/p>\n

While <\/span>Tron<\/i>\u2018s Christological and Cold War parallels are many and overt, I strangely enough found myself thinking of Cecil B. DeMille\u2019s second version of <\/span>The Ten Commandments<\/a><\/i> (<\/span>my review<\/a>) 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 \u201cfree souls under God\u201d or whether they are to be \u201cruled by the whims of a dictator\u201d \u2014 an obvious allusion to \u201950s politics. <\/span>Tron<\/i> 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 \u201creligious\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, things would be even <\/span>more<\/i> individualistic in <\/span>Tron<\/i>\u2018s world than in DeMille\u2019s world, since, in the place of one God, there would be many users. And for all its Christological elements, <\/span>Tron<\/i> actually sets up a scenario that would be very open to something more pagan \u2014 it is easy to imagine rival users (or rival gods) pitting their favorite programs (or heroes) against each other.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s put it this way: what would a <\/span>virus<\/i> look like in that world? And what, then, would an <\/span>anti-virus program<\/i> look like?<\/span><\/p>\n

Interestingly, the wife and I recently started going through <\/span>Babylon 5<\/a><\/i>, and I note that at least <\/span>two<\/i> of this film\u2019s actors became regulars in that series \u2014 Bruce Boxleitner played Tron in one and a commander in the other, while Peter Jurasik played Crom in one (he\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My review of Sin City is up, but if you\u2019ve read my original post on the subject, you\u2019ve 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nTron City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/04\/tron-city.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tron City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/04\/tron-city.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"FilmChat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2005-04-01T10:08:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter T. 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