Is the Futuristic World of TRON Outdated?

Arguably humans now interact with each other more digitally than in person. We have digitally uploaded our social lives onto the computer via Facebook and Twitter. Our body movements are now even digitized to avatars with technologies like Nintendo Wii, XBox Kinetic, and Playstation Move. So is the idea of uploading one's self into a digital world as novel as it was when TRON first came out in 1982? Will today's audience be as impressed as they were nearly three decades ago or is this a concept that they are all too familiar with? Watch as Emory professor Sidney Perkowitz discusses his option on the matter.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[TheTruth006]

He should just teach a class about the science of movies.

[ShadowArtist]

Another overall theme is a twist on the old archetypal chthonic (passing through a portal into a netherworld) journey in the vein of "The Wizard of Oz" or Odysseus's jouney into Hades realm. Another theme in the new film is that one can become in-a-sense encapsulated with so much tech that one is a metaphoric prisoner of it,which is both literal and symbolic in that Jeff Bridges character has been trapped in the cyberspace world he created for 20 years which to him as been thousands of years.

[cbot72]

IT'S NOT A REMAKE, IT'S A SEQUEL.

[radar550]

Yeah this is something I have already thought about. You are right. Matrix make totally sense but I dont think tron could be real. The way how computer works is totally different. There is no cyber reality in there. Maybe there will be computers which will work on different principle and there will be some way how to get into their digital world. But the idea put us into today computers is ridiculous.

[Courtney Coulson]

The laser part always stood out to me as something that didn't quite make sense. The Matrix had the right idea in that your body remains in the real world while your mind exists in the digital one.

In Tron, we see users get injured and tired, they also still need to eat and continue to age at the same rate as they would in reality and yet time is supposedly compressed in the Grid.

Oh well, best not to overthink it and let myself be distracted by all the glowing things.

[ShadowArtist]

Tron Legacy is a *sequel* to the 1982 film TRON, it's not a remake. There is more to the underlying story than just "going inside the computer". One of the themes is a "what if", which is what if digital life forms emerged and evolved on their own (self-aware digital beings with will to act on their own) and some choose to see humans as "gods" and others choose to see humans as oppressors to their freedom and want to establish their own empire and civilization without humans.