Isabel and I just finished watching Tron: Legacy, the spectacular art-adventure movie about life inside a computer.
It wasn't the best movie we've ever seen, but it was better than a Star Wars prequel. Take that as you will.
What I found most compelling about the movie, however, was it's surprisingly and most likely accidental anti-Leftist theme. Maybe it wasn't accidental. I just assume it was since Disney made it.
The main plot of the movie follows a young absentee CEO who gets sucked into a computer where his father (living Jeff Bridges) has been living for twenty years. Once trapped in the computer, he spends the rest of the movie trying to escape with his dad and a hot program chick, while also trying to prevent an evil program (computer-generated Jeff Bridges) from teleporting a clone army into the real world. Whatevs.
For me, what was most compelling was (spoiler) when living Jeff Bridges admits that he programmed computer-generated Jeff Bridges to engineer the perfect society within the fantasy computer world. In the process of admitting that this mght have been a bad idea, living Jeff Bridges also admits that people are incapable of designing a perfect world and that it was a mistake to even try. In fact, he comes to realize that it is better to just let the system play itself out.
This is most overtly expressed through a race of living creatures that exist with the cyberspace called the "Isos" (no idea how to spell that). The Isos apparently spontaneously generated within the cyberspace. They were not designed by any programmer, and yet they turn out to be a race of hyper-wise, beautiful, and seemingly immortal innocents. However, when CG Jeff Bridges sets out to create his "perfect society," he can find no place for the wild card Isos and has them all exterminated.
Pretty much seems like a tidy allegory against social engineering to me.
When man doesn't try to control the system, the system produces something greater than the sum of its parts. When man tries to impose too many rules to control the direction of the system, the system invariably becomes too powerful, becomes entirely self-serving, and ends up destroying the very things that it was originally supposed to protect.
Now, the movie is bookended by a seemingly anti-corporate message. A software company called Encom runs suspiciously like Apple and Microsoft. They keep updating their OS and charging exorbitant fees for upgrades that do little to improve utility. However, the company is ruthlessly protective of its source code -- which the absentee CEO secretly releases to the public during an opening sequence. I guess he's a linux user. (The first thing he does when he logs onto the computer that will zap him into Tron-land is type in "whoami"--perhaps the most metaphorical use of that piece of Linux code I have ever scene in a movie.)
And yet this seemingly anti-corporate sequence is actually sound business advice. It's essentially the argument that the Linux prophet Neal Stephenson makes in "In the Beginning Was the Commandline." Major corporations go through all this effort to keep their OSes secret, updated, glitzy, and complex, but the whole thing is a financial dead end. Eventually enough people will realize that there is a cheaper competitor (cheap as in free), and the coporate model of operating systems will be rendered obsolete.
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