Open Forum: What Do You Think of How the Metaverse Was Depicted in TRON: Legacy?

So TRON: Legacy opened last weekend, and it's largely set in a virtual world called "The Grid" (as depicted above.) I haven't seen it yet but I suspect many New World Notes readers already have. If so, how did you like the movie's depiction of the metaverse? Notice any parallels to what we're familiar with in world's like Second Life? Did some of it seem like a plausible future for the metaverse? Discuss those topics and more here!

Comments

[Extropia DaSilva]

Quorra (the female lead played by Olivia Wilde) looks a bit like me. So there is one parallel between Tron and Second Life.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I haven't seen it yet, but from the previews it looks like a glossy rebake of the original, which was based on the visual style and memes of the video games of the era.

As Yogi Berra observed, "the future ain't what it used to be".

But I sometimes wonder... if back then we had embraced a simpler, stylized aesthetic and focused all the energy we put into high-octane graphics into other aspects of game and virtual world development, where might we be now?

[rikomatic]

It's a gorgeously rendered vision, with amazing physics, a unique combat system, and a convoluted quasi-religious mythology. I want a light cycle battle zone in SL!

If there is one thing I would like to see integrated is the use of sound to add realism and heft to the virtual experience. The roar of the cycles, the hum of the Recognizers, the impact of the disc weapons all make the virtual seem real and visceral.

Basically we need more Daft Punk in the virtual world.

[Shockwave Plasma]

I've just seen it, and was not really impressed, It really could have been any sci-fi future, not inside a computer simulation.

[Nica Pennell]

Indeed, I think it needed to be more a bit more "magical" to properly represent the simulated interior of a computer.

For example when Sam Flynn arrived inside the computer in his regular street clothes, and they had to be cut off and sucked away into garbage disposal chutes. That's not how things worked back in the original Tron, programs didn't have clothing per se. - their neon-circuited parts were part of them. Worse, when they were having dinner at Kevin's hideout they had a completely ordinary roast suckling pig on the table. Are there digital pigs running around on this grid, killed without derezzing somehow and cooked over digital fires? In the original Tron programs fed off of nicely abstract liquid "energy".

So IMO it was nicely done as some sort of generic super-high-tech futurescape, maybe with rampant cybernetic nanotechnology to explain the shatter-into-cubes death effect and the identity disks and stuff like that. But it wasn't very good as an "inside the computer simuverse" setting.

[shockwave yareach]

A computer world where the tyrannical leadership terminates accounts on a whim, where some insane notion of "perfection" and its pursuit makes things far worse than they were before, and last year's greatest hero becomes this year's most vile oppressor.

Give it some poor graphics and stability problems, and I could possibly mistake it for SL, sure.

[Robert Hooker]

I didn't see it as a virtual world at all. Most as a internal space in which the issues of the past 20 of software development were stylistically played through the main character.

I certainly would not want to live in that world. I think the intensity of light and dark gave a platform for one developer's conflicts to play out of the differences of order/chaos, controlled/emergent, young/old, promise/threat.

As a stylistic drama of the "heart of the Internet" lets say I thought it actually had more truth than "The Social Network". That movie just tried to resolve all the issues to some stereotype about geeks as told by someone who hated nerds as a kid to an audience that hates nerds by envies their growing social dominance as a class.

[LokiLoki]

I rather enjoyed its slow retro pace. The old film haunts me as someone whos grown up with all the early 3D computer games, and unless you've seen the old film recently some vital scenes in this new Legacy loose dramatic impact.

It is not a vision of a future virtual worlds at all, its a world born and left to evolve itself without typist/users, cut off from the rest of the advancing world, its a retro virtual world with simple rules and no lag. Where programs find purpose in games and imperfections are a user/typist disease.

Infact if there was anything i would associate with second life it would be a content creators need to build imperfection to mimic the real world. Also the a legend or myth of virtual worlds is the bot that thinks and thrives on its own without a user/typist, that learns from the content built around it, an Ai born from its environment, its like the holy grail of virtual worlds and is represented in Tron Legacy as the ISOs which i liked.

There was alot of world in the film that was so briefly touched upon, like a glimpse or maybe a Browser based quicklook. It's a set up for more films and a tv series, its the rebirth of a franchise.

Regards to it's depiction of a metaverse, its nothing new, more of a reminder to us old geeks of where it began. We can be proud that we've taken the Tron Concept and are living in it... kinda...

http://gallery.me.com/eddysparks#100339

[Martien Pontecorvo]

As I mentioned in a group chat, if TRON 2.0 had been more realistic, Sam would have been a freebie anthro rabbit in mismatched freebie clothing, riding a penis hoverbike and shooting down spammycubes with a chicken cannon as they rolled across the landscape, smashing malls, clubs, sex dens, and shoddily made houses as they went.

[Troy McConaghy]

Some parts of T:L reminded me of SL, like the stair steps that floated in mid air.

In T:L, the "Grid" is mostly populated by "programs" (bots). In SL, the grid is mostly populated by real "users" (real people).

The visual style of T:L reminded me of CSI (the TV series): glowing neon light giving shape to mostly-dark forms.