TRON: Legacy parallels and analogies

    I was writing another blog post, but it felt incredibly slow, clunky, and generally disorganized, so I saved it as a draft and started writing about TRON: Legacy. (It was my mother's idea - be thankful, otherwise you might be reading an incredibly slow, clunky, and generally disorganized blog post right now.)

    TRON: Legacy has a lot of parallels and analogies. First, some of the major characters:
  Tron - A security program who fights for the users. In Legacy, CLU had corrupted him.
  Rinzler - The corrupted alias of Tron.
  Kevin Flynn - A User and primary creator of the new Grid. He disappeared in 1989.
  Sam Flynn - Kevin Flynn's son who was left in control of Encom, Kevin's company, when Kevin disappeared.
  CLU - Codified Likeness Utility. A creation of Kevin's which turned against him.
  Quorra - The last ISO after CLU massacred all other ISOs (assuming Castor/Zuse isn't one and/or is dead.)
Kevin, Sam, and Quorra are the main protagonists for purposes of the Grid, whereas CLU, Rinzler and the Black Guard are the main antagonists. The Flynns have a very Biblical analogy around them when on the Grid. Kevin can effectively change the world at will and has programs bowing down and praying to him (I'm not even kidding) as he's leaving the End of Line nightclub, while Sam doesn't fit into the Jesus mold perfectly when he first enters the Grid but grows into it quite nicely as time goes on. Meanwhile the antagonists all have a very fascist Germany feel to them: CLU, the main antagonist, portrays Hitler - he aggresively seeks Grid perfection above any other factors to the point of enacting an ISO genocide. The ISOs even have glowing TRON-style tattoos on their left arms, a hexagon to the left of a rotated T, which is analogous to the Star of David Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust.

    Some interesting parallels exist between Sam and Kevin and between Legacy and the original TRON. For example, both Sam and Kevin have an enormous window in their house which looks out upon a tower they own but can't go to. Then there are parallels between the film and its predecessor: when Sam cracks the Encom basement door, he says "Now that is a big door," which mimics Kevin's remark in TRON. As CLU is leaving the End of Line nightclub owned by Castor/Zuse, he says "End of line, man!" which both mocks the name of the club and is a parallel to the main antagonist of TRON (the Master Control Program) who would say "End of line." whenever he ended communication with an outside user.
    Before said scene, Kevin had walked into the same nightclub while a heated battle was occuring in the End of Line club in which the antagonists had the upper hand. Kevin touched the floor, changing the music - at which point the protagonists suddenly had the upper hand. As Kevin is leaving, he holds his hands in a Christ-like pose and programs bow down and pray to him (although only one is seen doing so on screen, it's virtually definite there were others doing the same.)

    Another interesting analogy is that most programs on CLU's "perfect" Grid will instantly and completely derez at even the slightest injury (they became imperfect and couldn't stay in one piece) whereas when Quorra was injured only the damaged limb derezzed (which REALLY enraged Sam.) It seems ironic that the 'perfect' programs are instantly killed by slicing off their arm, whereas Quorra, an 'imperfect' ISO, wasn't. Indeed, any perfect system will quickly become totally imperfect if even the vaguest amount of imperfection is introduced. (Think about a perfect wind system moving around a perfect sphere. Then, a small object enters the atmosphere. Soon the whole wind system will be completely chaotic.)