Tron Legacy: What a disappointment

[anatess]

Guys... THAT WAS THE PROBLEM WITH TRON... IT GOT STUCK IN THE 80'S!

Of course you have to beat up Tron on its technical merit - THAT'S WHAT THE TRON CULT IS ALL ABOUT - THE TECHNICAL MERIT! IT WAS A GIGANTIC PROGRAMMERS' EXPO!

You watch The Matrix and you're either in the cult for 1.) the geekness of living in a programmed world, 2.) the super-amazing still-spin camera shots and bullet trails, 3.) the martial arts, 4.) you just can't get enough of Carrie-Ann Moss in leather.

You watch Tron and you're in the cult for its geekness. Nothing else. The graphics - although amazing in 1982 - was not stellar. The acting was blah. The concept was "what the heck are you talking about" to movie goers (in the Philippines, especially), because the average Joe in 1982 has no idea what the heck a program is. People like the movie because of the "newness" of the cgi action. But they don't go cultish over it. Well, okay, there are those in the cult who are there for the soundtrack...

Tron followers expected the grid to go WEB and just go crazy! It would have been AMAZING! And it wouldn't have been a big leap to introduce the isos... it would even be really cool to make them go viral! Singularity - heck, I'm a programmer! Of course, I've gone toe-to-toe with a few fellow geeks over the concept of it. But YOU CANNOT even begin to touch singularity WHEN YOU'RE STILL STUCK WITH THE LIGHT CYCLES! Who plays with light cycles anymore??? NOBODY!

It would have been super amazingly exhilirating if Sam ended up playing Modern Warfare 2 to fight his way around the computer!

Geez, egapal! Being a System Administrator - not just a programmer - would have clued you in on that major discrepancy! The first question would have been - OKAY, WHERE IS THE SYSTEM???

Okay, here's what Tron Legacy could have been:
Flynn goes missing - he got stuck in the computer... back in '89.

Sam goes rogue and hands over Encom to the board, but he doesn't like where Encom is going, so he hacks into the server with his fancy PDA to figure out what's going on. Dillinger's son (I never did get his name) foils his attempts at it and kicks his program out... but, he gets a wierd signal on his PDA that looks like it came from his father - the hack program he inserted into the system triggered an event that cracked the Encom firewall for a split second giving Flynn the opportunity to send a signal out...

Because, the grid that became Flynn's prison is still at Encom connected to Flynn's Arcade through the old network, unused since 1989, so it is now buried under new technology - still connected to the rest of the Encom system but is outside the firewall.

So, Sam starts looking into what the signal means and goes to his father's good buddy Allen for an explanation. Allen then takes Sam into Flynn's Arcade to see if it came from there and they find his father's lab and the digitizer. Sam and Allen gets an a-ha moment thinking hey - Flynn still has the digitizer, so Flynn might have gotten stuck in there! So, Sam volunteers to get digitized to see if he can find his father... he instructs Allen to plug his PDA into Encom (because, of course, his PDA can't interface with 1989 computers).

So, Allen then sticks the PDA back at Encom and gets caught by Dillinger's son who then proceeds to hunt Sam's program down. Little did we know, that Dillinger's father was involved in getting Flynn stuck in the computer. That's how Dillinger got enough control of Encom to still make it the "big brother" and even got his son on the board. (Okay, I really don't like Dillinger back - you can go ahead and replace him somebody completely new).

So then Sam goes into the old grid, gets sooo wierded out by light cycles and disk throwers but then he finds his bevy of hack programs that Allen inserted into the system, so he goes shooting at the cycles with his machine gun, or whatever. He finds his dad, and they try to race out of the grid back to the portal... but Dillinger's program catches up with them and blocks the portal, so they had to go through the firewall (opened by Sam's program) and get to the rest of Encom and the Web!

So there Sam fights Dillinger in modern video game era! You name it - first person shooter games, running through the rockband stage and knocking over the drumset, and getting hit by the wii sports golfball, getting lost in facebook - which is this giant dance club/bar thing... they go through systems via wi-fi or 4G, so there's no Solar Sailer anymore - they just get sucked out and fly to the next system.

Man, that would have been really awesome...

And then, of course, Flynn is not without his super-programming-skills - so he goes to get Tron out of the "prison grid", and together they fight modern security programs so that he can get both him and Sam back to the digitizer to get back into the real world. That's when he finds Laura's lab that has evolved so much that they have programs now that can digitize and un-digitize - that is, get humans into the computer and programs out of the computer. And that was the thing that went with the Encom OS release - so that Encom can rule the world - or whatever. The new OS will enable Encom to suck up users into the system and replace them with programs! (Yeah, that would be border-line hokey but it's still cool - it still makes sense). And that's when Flynn realizes that that's the reason he got imprisoned in the computer - because he wouldn't have allowed Encom to do this to Laura's department.

So, Flynn goes chasing after Sam with this new undigitizing program (hey, let's make this that cute iso girl), but Dillinger's son and his army of programs is still chasing after Sam too, so Tron goes to battle Dillinger's army of programs (now, wouldn't this be nostalgic to have Tron fighting with his disc and Dillinger's army shooting him with sub-machine guns.) Flynn and Sam finally meet up and invokes the un-digitizer and goes flying out of a phone app startling the guy using the phone... that would have been really funny and cool at the same time...

But then, Dillinger captures the undigitizer program and forces her to un-digitize him... so Tron ends up blowing up everything killing Dillinger and his army and the undigitizer with it together with the entire Encom OS.

Flynn takes control over Encom once more but then hands the company over to his son...

The end.

Okay, you can put iso's in there now... even have them cure cancer if you want. It's believable now because you're in the modern era - where Filipino teen-agers can bring down the American economy with the I Love You virus.

P.S. I'm getting my love from my fellow geeks (my husband is one of them - he's a server admin). We had fun talking about "how it could have been"...