You've probably forgotten about TRON: Legacy. It came out 5 years ago to mostly meh reviews. It would be nice if I could forget about it too, but yesterday I woke up with a clear list of small changes that would've made a big difference. For the purpose of getting them out of my head, I present them here.

First, a quick reminder of the actual plot.

Act I

Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, reprising his role from the 1982 original) has gone missing and his son, Sam (Garrett Hedlund), is a lost-cause-with-a-heart-of-gold. Sam breaks into ENCOM headquarters to release ENCOM's latest operating system onto the web for free. Afterward, Sam gets a visit from Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) who suggests he check out the old arcade to find his dad. Sam discovers a secret room and gets sucked into The Grid.

Act II

Sam is forced to play in The Games, defeated by the mysterious Rinzler, and revealed as a User. He's taken to meet CLU (a CGI version of 1982 Jeff Bridges), who briefly masquerades as his father before sending him back to The Games to die. He's rescued by Quorra (Olivia Wilde) and taken to meet his father "off-grid". Dad tells the tale of creating a "perfect system" with TRON and CLU, until a miraculous new race called Isomorphic Algorithms (Isos) appeared and CLU led a coup d'etat to remove the system of impurities, killing all of them.

Act III

Sam returns to The Grid to find Zeus, who will lead him to The Portal so he can go home and delete CLU from the outside. Zeus betrays him to CLU and Sam is rescued by his dad and Quorra (again!) but not before CLU steals the elder Flynn's identity disc. The three head for The Portal and Quorra is revealed as the last Iso. Once there, they discover CLU is repurposing existing Programs into an army to conquer the real world. Rinzler turns out to be TRON and heroically sacrifices himself to take out CLU. CLU survives but Flynn "reintegrates" him, dying while Sam and Quorra escape.

Rewatching the movie to prepare this summary, it's clear that my expectations were too high. They get a lot of things right. The overall visual style is an excellent iteration on the original while remaining unique. The soundtrack is amazing. Kevin Flynn and Quorra are both fairly interesting characters. The fight scenes are exciting and I'm totally behind wielding identity discs as weapons.

Still, there are a number of small changes that would have made a big difference. I'll go ahead and assume that major elements, like Jeff Bridges playing a big role but having a younger actor play the protagonist, were important for "Hollywood reasons" and are off-limits.

Flynn is in a Coma

It's silly that people can get sucked into computers and disappear entirely, so let's ditch that straight away. Sam's dad is not missing. He has been in a coma for years, not long after his wife died. He started spending longer and longer hours at work and one day they found him unconscious at his computer. Sam visits his dad in the hospital and tells him his latest exploits, trying to maintain a connection even though his dad is "gone". When Alan comes to tell Sam that he got a page from Kevin Flynn, the world is immediately turned upside down.

A consequence of this change is that there's no way for Programs to escape The Grid into the real world, which significantly changes Act III. See below.

Quorra is Sam's Sister

The idea of the Isos spontaneously manifesting only to be wiped out by genocide all within a flashback is an unnecessarily complicated way to ratchet up the importance of Quorra. An easier explanation is that she is the first User/Program hybrid, the love child of Kevin Flynn — recently devestated by his wife's death and seeking solace in the world he created — and a Program. Sam is understandably jealous that his dad chose to stay in The Grid with his half-sister rather than return home, resulting in a scene where he rejects both of them.

This also presents an opportunity to greater differentiate between Users and Programs. The original makes the religious relationship explicit, even having one Program ask another, "Do you believe in the Users?" The sequel maintains this relationship but has (appropriately) pushed it to the background. With Quorra as a both-User-and-Program Jesus figure, the relationship would be re-opened and introduce some lovely philosophical quandries.

CLU Wants a World Without Users

The central conflict between CLU and his creator is that the former wants to create the perfect system and the latter becomes infatuated with the Isos. That's honestly not very compelling to begin with and disappears entirely once we remove the Isos. The movie does play with the idea of control versus spontaneity but falls short of making this the reason for CLU's falling out. It would make sense that CLU (especially when Flynn falls in love with a Program) perceives Users as the greatest threat to perfection in his system.

Additionally, the biggest technology difference between the original TRON in 1982 and this sequel — the rise of the Internet — is conspicuously absent (although Wi-Fi does get a casual mention). It would make sense that CLU, feeling that he has fulfilled his duty of creating perfection in the current system, would want to continue his anti-User jihad to other systems. As this conquest would result in plunging the real world into a pre-computer state, Flynn prevents it by keeping The Portal closed so CLU can't spread.

Let TRON Be TRON

The movie fails TRON is three major ways:

1. They wrap him in this Rinzler nonsense to heighten the reveal of his identity,
2. His visual style is not sufficiently different from the other Control Programs (his helmet is different and he has a tiny, stylized "T" on his armor), and
3. They keep him on CLU's leash without any agency.

These things could all be resolved by keeping him TRON from the beginning (complete with the original neon blue stylings). He'd stand out against the other bad guys and force the audience to wonder why somone who supposedly "fights for the Users" is aligned with CLU and the Control Programs?¹

The answer is that TRON believes Flynn has abandoned The Grid and feels betrayed. He's immediately skeptical of Sam but slowly puts together CLUes that Flynn never left The Grid and ultimately regains faith in Users. He could still play the Dragon role, but have passionate disagreements with CLU behind closed doors. "You fought for the Users once," CLU may say, "And what did they do for you?"

Quorra Stays to Rule The Grid

With the necessary removal of the Isomorphic Algorithm subplot, there's no reason that Quorra needs to leave The Grid and in fact it makes a lot more sense that she'd stay to clean up after CLU is destroyed. The movie's coda would change from Sam and Quorra seeing a real sunrise in the real world to Quorra, her User abilities now manifested, creating the first sunrise ever in The Grid.

Meanwhile, Sam attends his father's funeral² and tells Alan he's ready to take over at ENCOM. We get a final glimpse of Edward Dillinger (Cillian Murphy), setting up the sequel. Credits.

Okay, so this is a weird post. It's my first in over a year and, despite a lot of notable things happening in my life during that time, it somehow became the thing that compelled me to write. I think I'm fine with that, because I had been caught in an is-this-important-enough spiral. Maybe I'll do "Man of Steel" next, because that genuinely sucked and didn't need to.

[1] CLU and the Control Programs, great band name.

[2] Flynn could also live to reunite in the real world with his son but then retire. It would give Sam a happy ending but accomplish the same plot point.

[3] Earlier versions of this post regretfully referred to Tron and Klu, whereas TRON and CLU are both acronyms for historical programs (TraceOn and Command Line Utilities, respectively). My apologies.