Dude, we already HAD Empire Strikes Back - it's called Legacy. We frankly went from Phantom Menace to Empire Strikes Back without anything in between.

Almost everything that was hopeful about the previous movie was crushed; The Rebels fall at the Battle of Hoth, and it looks like the remnants of Beck's crew are crushed at the End of Line.

The old mentor types don't bother to go out and fight, choosing to cower away from the galaxy and attempt scolding the hero into apathy. Flynn gets better, Yoda does not.

A nascent, but not yet overt love story (Han & Leia / Sam & Quorra)

Betrayal by a flamboyant ally (though Lando had better reasons than Zues)

No victory conditions - the heroes just get away with their skins intact, but with a heavy casualty rate and loss.

And the fate of Darth Vader/Tronzler is still an open question.


Or it's Knights of the Old Republic where the whole arc is summed up as "It gets worse." OK, canonically, Revan goes light, pulls Bastila back with him, gets the Cross of Glory, and the Sith are kinda trashed.

Open the sequel, and the Republic is a mess, Revan upped and pulled a Flynn (running off, vanishing, and telling no one what in hell he was doing, leaving them with no closure or answers. At least Flynn didn't run off while Jordan was knocked up, though). The Sith are fighting with some nasty hit and run tactics, the Jedi are toast, everyone hates the Jedi and blames them for causing the War (even Exile who wasn't even there when the mess happened), the "allies" resemble a psych ward, and no matter what you choose, it doesn't matter. Exile then picks up the same idiot ball Revan was carrying and runs off into the unknown - again, the allies are treated like dirt and don't even get so much as a note.

It all ends with Exile dead, Revan worse than dead (remember those Jedi on the Star Forge level? Yeah.), Darth Cthulhu (the Emperor) pretty much stripping Revan's mind for parts (and Revan will CLAIM he was holding the Emperor back, but color me skeptical - Cthulhu does as he pleases, and all Darth Cthulhu really WANTS is to devour everything in the universe except himself), while the Sith charge in and lay waste to half the Republic anyway. Oh, and when you play through the MMO? It looks like no good deed of Revan's or Exiles mattered in the long run - Taris? GREAT example. And the guy who literally stabbed Exile in the back and got Revan captured gets to play Karma Houdini and bunk with the Jedi Knight character.

In the Tron universe? Flynn's dead and took Clu with him. The Grid has had all the beauty and wonder brutalized out of it, and will probably not trust Sam worth anything (Clu's supporters hate Users, and those who fought against Clu probably resent Flynn for leaving them to hang). Tronzler? Who knows? Even in the best case scenario, he's going to be overheating his processor with massive amounts of guilt. We have no idea what became of Beck or Yori. The Encom boardroom was run by crooks for years so Alan and Sam will be mucking out the proverbial Augean stables. Quorra is in a whole new world, but she's lost everything, and will never truly be part of digital or analog. Alan and Roy get no answers, only the news that it was too late and all their work was for nothing. It looks like Dillinger Sr has either merged with Master Control like some nasty twist on Ma3a's concept, or Master Control 2.0 is manipulating Dillinger Jr. into some dirty work. Either way, we've got a problem. And Sam will be spending the rest of his life cleaning up and atoning for mistakes he never made.

Overall? As Tron 3 opens, the situation is horribly bleak already. We're going to need something more like of the Old Republic or ROTJ or even the Thrawn Trilogy to dig us out.

Do a Google image search for "tron legacy" and see the hundreds of straight results of that cold greenish-blue color. Slightly exaggeratedly speaking, that's pretty much all I remember of Tron Legacy's color palette. T82 was warmer, which I appreciated.

T:L's cold, bleak world and vistas feels empty and unfinished to me (especially in scenes like solar sailer one). T82 at least had sunset type of colors on the horizon to add some color to the skies and warmth to the movie... at times. I still know many here at the Sector rather enjoy and prefer the unwavering cold bleak world of T:L. That's cool... it's all just preferences.

T3 can have more interesting worlds, imo, by incorporating more T82-style intracies and details, along with additional coloring; and can easily do so without making it look like it was made in 1982. More color, and incorporating warmer colors for variety is a start; it doesn't have to to mimic T82's color scheme to the T. T:L's 1.5 hours of the same cold color scheme got old to me. I'm somewhat fine with it for one movie, but I can't take another 1.5 hours of the same in T3.

I also enjoyed T82's intricate bleeps and blips of light (some with sound) woven into practically every scene; many intentional, some technical artifacts. I'm mainly referring to the intentional ones, but either way, they made the environment more interesting and more computer-worldly, imo. T:L's sets 'themselves' were pretty static throughout. All of the light strips and panels in T:L had perfectly steady illumination, with no blips... General Electric and the power company would be proud!

As for the discussion about story; I think that we'll have Quorra feeling out of place and homesick, wanting to go back to the grid. Obviously, returning to Kevin's system is out of the question, so Sam pleads to Alan to give them access to the Encom computers. Yada yada, big operation, we find out that research and development on the Shiva lasers have advanced greatly, and a giant laser apparatus is no longer needed for digitization. (I feel like making Shiva lasers more portable would open up a lot of doors for the story later on.) Sam and Quorra go into Encom's system, which is, of course, largely different looking from Flynn's grid and probably closer to the T82 design ideas.

Obviously, Encom's grid would be connected to the internet. I would imagine the internet's relation to the grid being a quite literal information superhighway; a giant street with a gate, through which data trains would cross in and out of. Programs that require internet access can ride out into the superhighway, which would take them to a giant city where popular sites are personified as buildings. The main people navigating the city wouldn't be programs, but browsers, which the users control and when they go to a website, the browser physically walks into the building and accesses whatever must be accessed.

I imagine a good conflict would not be MCP2 or anything of the sort, but a smaller threat. Perhaps, a virus that is similar to Abraxas that gets in through the internet. I don't actually want Dillinger Jr. to be the main villain of the sequel. I want Dillinger Jr. to be used sparingly in various sequences throughout the movie, hinting to a much bigger threat in a third movie, which will bring back various threats and conflicts from the previous two.

You know, one thing that would be interesting, is say in the next Tron movie, Sam and Quorra team up with Tron and some other security program, fighting off a virus that has randomly appeared in the Encom grid. What if we were to discover that Dillinger Jr. made the virus, and then created the other security program to fight it off so that he'd look impressive to the board... I don't know, it's not relevant to the current discussion but I thought it was an interesting idea.

KingJ.exe Wrote: A fantastic example of what could happen should they decide to merge the '82/2.0 scheme with the Legacy scheme was seen in the latest TRON: Uprising episode, with the "Compressed Space." Way cool.

Which Episode is this?

LWSrocks2 Wrote:You know, one thing that would be interesting, is say in the next Tron movie, Sam and Quorra team up with Tron and some other security program, fighting off a virus that has randomly appeared in the Encom grid. What if we were to discover that Dillinger Jr. made the virus, and then created the other security program to fight it off so that he'd look impressive to the board... I don't know, it's not relevant to the current discussion but I thought it was an interesting idea.

Personally, I'd like to see a setup where Sam butts heads with Dillinjr in the real world (clashing personalities, bad history between their fathers, etc.), then must return to the Grid, where he needs to work with a program written by Dillinjr to succeed. Over the course of the movie, he comes to respect for this program, and by association, Dillinjr himself.
(I've always felt that, at least the way they were portrayed in the original Tron, programs were reflections of their creators' inner essence, their higher (or in Sark's case, baser) selves, and I'd enjoy seeing Tron 3 use that device as part of a character arc that way.)

For TR3N, they definitely need to continue the Dillinger tie-in that was included in Legacy.

laphtiya Wrote:A comment such as "giving away our software for free, disappeared with Kevin Flynn" suggests to me that these two will not see eye to eye. I wouldn't be surprised if Dillenger Jr is more like his father that first glanced. I get the feeling he is also "very very sneaky" just like his father, he kinda oozes that in the scene I didn't like him at all (not the actor or the character I just thought "yeah, he isn't a good guy").

That line bugged me as well when I first started writing about him, and I thought it might scrap my entire idea, until I realized: he's merely stating fact. That doesn't necessarily mean it's his own opinion (although certainly Mackey et al would see it that way and he'd look like the good little boy toeing the company line)... and the condescension in his voice could either be for Alan, or could signify what he thinks of the idea. Dillinjr quite obviously hasn't drunk the company kool-aid... how you wish to interpret that is up to you.

Kat, you and I seem on the same wave length about a few things pertaining to a potential sequel. I was just thinking that everyone expects Dillinger Junior to be the next bad guy. Just cos his dad was the villain in T1, doesn't mean he will be.

Let's not forget they added the sneak peaks at the end of T2 : The Next Day. There would be no point doing a movie that in some way didn't follow on from that.

Also, Quorra being in the real world, the ISOs were going to redefine civilization according to Flynn. I think perhaps it could all have some kind of religious backdrop to the saga. Users being looked upon as gods? Creators?

I've said it before and I'll say it again (sorry), I want to see less of the real world in the computer (as Kat says "Rain", rocket thrust on the recognizers, and a proper good old de-rezzing effect like in T1). It was too real, the computer world is something totally different and can have that element of magic, the unknown. And, Sam Flynn didn't have any user powers.

At the end of the day, I like a happy ending. I want Flynn back in the real world, on his Ducati (shaven preferably! lol) and re-discovering that boyish humour and a lust for life. That was one of my disappointments from Legacy that Flynns character was so different, not a fighter, the sparkle had gone. I think the look from the movie made him look older than he is. Looked cool in Iron Man.

Anyway, that's my piece said for now.