Monthly Archive for March, 2006

Released in 1982, Tron is an animated feature film from the Walt Disney Corporation. This film combines live action with CGI and traditional cell animation. The artistic result is way ahead of it’s time; indeed we can safely argue that Tron is the visual forerunner of the cyberpunk genre. The “computer world” of Tron has inspired the alternative realities of more recent works such as Sega’s “Rez” and “The Matrix”.

Tron’s plot is a thinly veiled allegory for the great debate between operating system pioneers Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tannenbaum; spesifically the eternal battle between advocates of monolithic operating system design vs micorkernel. Tron’s producers take a very one-sided view of this argument – the monolithic “Master Control Program” is clearly the bad guy, however in their credit, this was merely the received wisdom of the age. Regardless of the computer-science flaws, the film is visually superb entertainment more than twenty years after it’s original release.

That isn’t to say the film has dated; It certainly has – while the animated sections remain compelling, the live action segments set in the real world appear ludicrous and clumsy. They lack the panache of the virtual-reality scenes and only serve to provide a somewhat redundant set-up for the entirely self-contained animated sequences that form the body of the film.

The live-action epilogue is also baffling in it’s redundancy. I suspect the film producers were trying to provide some kind of revenge themed closure, in which our hero replaces the corrupt manager of the company; Once again, this live action sequence detracts from the final sequence of the animated section where we see “Flynn” rise god-like from the spinning wreck of the “master-control program”. We can only assume he has made it, but his absence from the cyberscape after that moment leaves us in doubt.

One of the film’s main strengths is it’s sound-track. The score was composed and performed by Wendy Carlos (an associate of the recently deceased synth-pioneer Bob Moog), with help from the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s evocative, subtle, original and entirely spoilt by a number of unimaginative prog-rock tracks by a band called “Journey”. Fortunately there are only two sections of prog-rock in the film, both of which are somewhat redundant.

Perhaps by now you have twigged, that it’s my intent to correct some of these flaws. In a nutshell, we have an visually superb film spoilt by some unnecessary, badly-filmed live-action sequences. Thanks to affordable digital editing software I can now take my DVD copy of this film and completely strip it of all of it’s flaws, leaving a shorter, more challenging and ambiguous film.

When you remove the “real world” from Tron you get a completely different effect. Without any orientation, we do not nececarily know from the beginning what the nature of these characters who inhabit the virtual world are.

We see Clu apprehended and apparently crushed by a “recogniser” at the start of the film. In the original version Clu is destroyed and replaced by his alter-ego. In my version he is merely thrown into the “game-grid” as a result of his capture. Naturally that also explains his colour change. In Tron, the MCP’s agents are predominantly coloured red, whereas the fugitive programs are pale-blue.

Of courese, if the real-world does not exist then how do we explain Clu/Flynn’s change of manerism and his claims to be a user. Before his apprehension he makes no reference to userdom (the equivalent to divinity in the computer-world). Is Clu delusional or perhaps some kind of computer-world mesiah.

My reduced ending also adds a delicious ambiguity to what in the original version is shown to be a clean escape. Clu/Flynn is propelled upwards in the disintegration of the MCP. He is not shown to have been destroyed, but nor is he shown to be safe, or re-united with the programs that he has saved from assimilation. We are now free to interpret the nature of his escape for ourselves.

Sadly, the film Tron and it’s soundtrack are copyrighted works. This means I cannot legally distribute a copy of this movie, however I will release my “Edit Decision List”, the recipe for you to take a copy of the Tron film and re-create my edits. This will be released into the public domain, which means that anybody is free to view this classic work of science fiction is it was meant to be.