In the name of the Father and of the Tron...

As pretty much all of you who read this know, I saw TRON: Legacy last weekend.  For reasons even I don’t fully understand, I loved it.  A big part of it was due to the fact that I actually liked the story and it made sense to me, unlike the many critics who just couldn’t follow it or didn’t like what they did understand.  Looking back at the story, I can see two main reasons why.

1) I have watched the original TRON within the last 4 months

2) I attended a Catholic high school.

Weren’t expecting that second one, were you?  But as it happens, TRON: Legacy is filled with crazy-tons of religious symbolism and biblical stories all piled together in one mish-mash of awesome, something which my years of Bible study and comparative religion have allowed me to appreciate.  Now I am by far not the first person to point out the obvious religious symbolism in the movie, but I’d like to put my own take on some of the details.  Here’s a pretty spoiler free-one - the opening narration that sets the tone for the movie:

The grid.

A digital frontier.

I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer.

What did they look like?

Ships?  Motorcycles?

Were the circuits like freeways?

I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see.

And then, one day,

I got in.

What I love about this is the way it’s spoken.  At least on the soundtrack, the whole thing has the feeling of a religious story or an old fairy tale.  In a strange way, it almost feels like someone reciting the words of a prophet’s story written in the Bible.  Here, take a look at what happens when just a few nouns are swapped out:

Heaven.

A spiritual frontier.

I tried to picture clusters of souls as they moved through the realm.

What did they look like?

Ghosts?  People?

Were the angels like humans?

I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see.

And then, one day,

I got in.

This is what really got me thinking about the religious symbolism of the movie, and what I found is really interesting.  But for those of you who haven’t watched the movie yet, please don’t continue reading until you have.  The movie is worth seeing all theatrical-like and in 3D without spoilers (just make sure that you watch the original movie first or else the story will be harder to understand and much less fun).  If you need, here’s the original movie all in one go on YouTube: 

HERE THAR BE SPOILERS.

Right-o.  So in TRON: Legacy, we have Kevin Flynn, a User and the father of Sam Flynn, who is trapped in a world in which he has god-like powers and which he has, in part or in whole, created.  Many cycles ago, Flynn created a program named Clu in his own image.  Flynn’s command to Clu was simple: help create a perfect world.  Flynn and Clu worked together in harmony to perfect the digital world until a new kind of program appeared.  These programs were called ISOs, and they were unique for appearing spontaneously without having been programmed and for having the ability to evolve and learn, almost like they had souls.  Kevin Flynn (the Father) sees these new creations as wonderful miracles with great potential to shape the future, and they become his favored children in The Grid.  Clucifer (sorry, couldn’t resist) sees these programs (humans) as flaws in a perfect system, seeks to destroy all of them, and rebels against the Father to usurp him and take over The Grid.  

In what is possibly the best metaphorical answer to the question “If God exists, where is he now and why isn’t he doing anything about all these wars” that I’ve ever seen, Flynn ends up hiding from Clu outside of the Grid proper in a home where he mostly sits around and meditates on nature of the universe while looking exactly like Michelangelo’s interpretation of God:

Seriously, the hair, the beard, the robes, the weird thing(s) on his back…

The reason given for him not leaving and, say, doing something in either of his worlds is that if he does, Clucifer will instantly find him, grab his info disc, and hitch it up to his digital Tower of Babel so that he and his army of fallen angels humans programs can walk amongst the Users and cause an Apocalypse by taking over the world.  Clu’s rebel programs have two possible origins: either they turned to serve him willingly (Castor, for instance) or they were brainwashed and corrupted into serving him instead of the Users.

Flynn’s only company is Quarra, the last remaining ISO, a young woman who is naïve and pure and innocent and completely loyal to him, making her possibly the first time that the Virgin Mary has been so clearly realized as a digital character. 

Ultimately, the restoration of the balance in the world only comes about when Sam Flynn, Kevin Flynn’s approximately thirty year old Son who shares the same substance as his Father (flesh, blood, and DNA as opposed to zeroes and ones) becomes data incarnate.  His mission: rescuing his father to get him (and by extension his father’s corporate message of generosity and good will) back to the physical world, which will in turn save his father’s company (his father’s people) from its path of selfishness and corruption.  In doing so, he also helps his father to purify the Grid of Clu’s evil influence and saves the last of the ISOs (humanity) before both he and the Virgin Mary stand-in are assumed, body and soul, back into heaven/reality.

Clearly there are problems with this analysis, what with things like the programs standing in for both humans and angels as necessary and the Son falling in love with the Virgin Mary.  But hey, I never claimed that this movie was an exact Biblical retelling, just that there's a lot of religious symbolism in this movie.  I think I've proven my point.  I hope at least one person cares about this, because I've just blown about 2.5 hours of quality homework time getting this out of my system.