JoDee and I just finished watching Tron Legacy. For those of you wanting my review of the movie, let me quickly summarize; 10 year old boy gets hold of Tron Franchise, adds karate, kung-fu, and a bunch of special effects. Leaves plot to 6 year old younger brother, and gets huge budget to produce film. JoDee's summary: it was like watching a porno. I think that summarizes it up pretty nicely; there was a lot to look at, but not a lot of plot that made any sense.

Basically, Kevin Flynn after the first movie decides to try making a utopia in the computer. He visits the computer-world, creates another version of himself called CLU, and rolls up his sleeves to create this utopian world. In this process, an artificial life is spawned (named the ISOS). CLU somehow decides that these are anathema, and kills off the whole lot, save for one that manages to escape (named Quorra). The movie picks up with Sam Flynn, Kevin Flynn's son, entering Flynn's arcade, getting sucked into the computer world, where Sam Flynn plays some video games while inside the computer and tries to rescue his dad. I won't bore you with the rest of the details of the movie, but will say that it's about two hours of your life that you won't easily get back.

There's one part, though, that sticks in my craw. Kevin Flynn (referred to as Flynn from here on out) wrote computer games. When he was dragged into the game grid by the Master Control Program, he saw those games used for gladiatorial combat. Programs were pitted against each other in mortal contests, where the loser of the game "died" via a horrible de-resollution (de-rezzing). In essence, the program no longer existed.

I'm not sure about you, but if I realized that something I'd created caused others to die horribly, even if they were only programs, I'd probably stop doing that thing.

Not our boy Flynn. In Tron Legacy, there's a Tron arcade machine, which leads me to believe that Flynn not only compiled these into a game, but he also sold these games to just about every arcade out there. There's thousands of these games out there. So, upon knowing that these games in his own arcade were killing programs, Flynn decided to put them all together into one convenient package. Even better, the movie showed updated versions of these contests. Under Flynn's watch, these games were updated and perfected.

Instead of mounting a crusade to stop people from playing video games because they were killing programs, he decided to just go with the flow and collect a tasty profit.

Yep, Zen-spouting Flynn is one sadistic bastard.