Building a Better Future: TRON Legacy and Optimistic Science Fiction

I was at just the right age when TRON Legacy came out in 2010. A young teen with a small but quickly growing fascination with film, I'd already seen the original TRON and gawked at how far technology had come. The silly skin-tight costumes and the ancient but endearing special effects made it, if nothing else, a kitschy historical artifact I couldn't help but be interested in. So when the sequel finally came out of its long gestation period with it's sleek look and Daft Punk soundtrack, I was instantly hooked. And while plenty can and has been said about the relatively simple story that largely serves as backdrop for the stylish action, I adored it at the time, and it's a film that's stuck with me, partially for the same reasons that the original seemed to stick with a different generation of film fans. Not only for its unique look and aesthetic that no one else really was doing at the time, but because of the fact that...well, we never saw any formal follow up. Garret Hedlund, the star of Legacy, even joked in an interview that "maybe 30 years from now" we'll see a return, referencing the time between the first two.

I could talk forever about why the film failed to produce a follow up despite interest at the time (and a short film included on the DVD that teased more). Especially since "failed" might be a bit of an exaggeration with Legacy; the film did manage to be the 12th highest grossing movie of the year, after all. But to make a long story short, the main reason (though not entirely the only reason) seemed to be that, despite the fact that it made money, it didn't make enough. This was 2010, during a time when Disney was still in the middle of building it's burgeoning Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it's somewhat telling that that year's entry, Iron Man 2, ended up the third highest grossing movie of that year. And while they very well could've done both, Disney decided to invest in its superheroes more than its sci-fi, and I think that's a shame. Not because I don't like what the MCU has become, and in all honesty, I wouldn't exactly trade the MCU just to have another TRON, but revisiting Legacy recently has reminded me why it bummed me out so much that this never became a franchise, and that's because TRON, for its storytelling faults, is surprisingly very hopeful as a film.

Sci-fi, especially lately, seems to be trending the pessimistic, from Ex Machina to Black Mirror, and I can understand why. Sci-fi has always been used to examine humanity and try to work through our anxieties of the future and of the unknown, and the answers aren't always pretty. When gazing into the unknown, Ex Machina imagines advancing AI as something that could be as perverse as it is intoxicating (without spoiling anything). Black Mirror questions if humanity has any right to reach for a future it has no idea how to truly deal with yet. But TRON stares into the unknown and sees possibility. What follows includes some spoilers for Legacy, though I can't say that knowing them would really ruin the experience.

The original TRON largely dealt with Jeff Bridges' character, Kevin Flynn, discovering this digital world where programs have developed a form of sentience, largely due to the work of both Flynn's co-worker and the corporation they worked for, ENCOM. He ends up being digitized into this world, called the Grid, and frees it from a sentient and tyrannical program called the Master Control Program. Legacy follows 30 years later, with Kevin Flynn having gone missing within the Grid, and with his son, Sam Flynn, following him into the digital world to try to find him. After eventually finding his father, Sam discovers the reason Kevin was doing so much work in this digital world after the events in the first film. Kevin explains that he had been trying to develop a "perfect" computer system. What exactly this means isn't entirely elaborated upon, but that's largely because Flynn discovered something he never expected to find in a world that is ostensibly created by humans. He discovered a naturally occurring race of sentient beings in the Grid that he refers to as "isomorphic algorithms," or ISO's. In the world of the Grid, every single being (that's not a digitized human like Sam and Kevin) is a program that was explicitly and intentionally created by the humans who built the computer they exist in. But not the ISO's. Their very existence is entirely unexplained, spontaneous, and open an entire world of possibility for Flynn.

And that's what struck me when I saw it. The idea that humanity's potential for creation and innovation makes it possible not only to create these kind of vast systems and computer networks, but that potentially we could be responsible for the creation of an entire new lifeform. Unpacking it even further, could an argument be made that the ISO's as an entity redefines the very concept of "life" as we know it in the universe? After all, they're not carbon based, they're entirely digital, but unlike most of the programs in the Grid, they're not really "man-made" in the same way as the regular programs. Every other program in the Grid acts, does, and says what they do because their human creators have programmed them to do so. But the ISO's are entirely and independently sentient. It would not be a stretch to say that the naturally occurring nature of the ISO's are somewhat similar to how life on Earth naturally occurred due simply to the ideal factors all coming together in the right way to create carbon-based life. The idea that we could be responsible for the conditions under which life as it is known in the universe is completely redefined; that's something that's so humanistic and hopeful about the potential of technology and human achievement, it's hard to wrap your mind around. And, at that point, the natural question is, if a human like Flynn can digitize himself into the Grid, then can an ISO un-digitize themselves into our world (which we get an answer to by the end of the film)? What would that mean for them genetically? What is their biological make-up? Those last questions are what Kevin spends the film fighting for, as he theorizes that bringing an ISO into our world and examining their biology might lead to untold advances in medicine, science, philosophy, even religion.

It's a surprisingly heady topic to come out of a movie that a lot of critics felt was kind of dumb when it came to its story. And while there's a fair point to be made that the film might prioritize its action and spectacle over its narrative (in particular it's character development), it's still interesting to see something like this in a major Hollywood blockbuster, and even more interesting that it failed. I mentioned that box office wasn't the only reason that Legacy never saw a proper follow up, and another reason that certain members of the crew have talked about is the poor performance of the 2015 film, Tomorrowland, which is another sci-fi film with a very optimistic and humanistic bent to it. It was heavily rumored, and eventually confirmed, that much of the reason Tron 3 was shelved was because Tomorrowland seemed to suggest to Disney that audiences weren't interested in high concept/high budget sci-fi, something that no doubt has been reaffirmed by the studio after the recent failure of this past March's A Wrinkle in Time.

Whether Disney's right to lose such faith in these kinds of properties (personally, I had a lot of problems with both Tomorrowland and A Wrinkle in Time that were more problems with the individual films than with the ideas/concepts), it's sad to see that there doesn't seem to be much of a market right now for a strain of science fiction that seeks to be more forward thinking and hopeful rather than fearful. I have nothing against films like Ex Machina (one of my favorite sci-fi films of the past several years), but I've always felt that it's best to have a balance. I don't know if it's very productive to be constantly paranoid about the futures we want to avoid without also being conscious of the kinds of futures we want to see. And, to the industry's credit, they've not entirely abandoned those ideals. One of my other favorite sci-fi films in recent memory is 2015's The Martian, which seems to be the exception in terms of science fiction that seeks to inspire hope more so than to caution its viewers. And more importantly for the people who sign the checks in Hollywood, it also did incredibly well at the box office. Perhaps it's down to trying to keep costs in check (The Martian was notably significantly cheaper to make than Legacy, Tomorrowland, and A Wrinkle in Time) or perhaps it's just a matter of figuring out how to market them correctly (Forbes' Scott Mendeleson made a strong case that Tomorrowland did a very poor job at telling audiences what it even was).

Regardless, TRON Legacy's failure disappoints me. It's discouraging that a film with not only such a unique style, but also a very ambitious premise, couldn't find an audience despite it making as good an attempt as I think they could've with what they had. But it also makes me hopeful that someone out there in some studio board room was taking the right notes and learning the right lessons. And who knows? Disney themselves have recently floated around the possibility of rebooting the TRON franchise as recently as last fall, so only time will tell. Until then, Flynn Lives, if not on the big screen, then at least for me, along with all the possibilities that come with it.

Sources: 

https://screenrant.com/tron-3-tomorrowland-garrett-hedlund/

http://comicbook.com/movies/2017/11/18/tron-3-reboot-garrett-hedlund-sam-flynn/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2015/05/26/disneys-tomorrowland-failure-is-not-an-indictment-of-hollywood-originality/#2da435265f95

Album Analysis: Queens of the Stone Age (1998) by Queens of the Stone Age

In an interview with The Guardian, Queens of the Stone Age frontman, Josh Homme, described the debut Queens record as "trance music" and "something that girls could dance to," deliberately trying to step away from the very macho and very in-your-face approach of his previous band, legendary stoner rock pioneers, Kyuss. Kyuss was like a snarling dog: vicious, mean, and charged with a macho territorial aggression of a young band eager to prove itself. Queens may not lack aggression, but it's aggression of a different stripe. Whereas Kyuss records like Welcome to Sky Valley have power in their guitar, Queens' self-titled debut had a more laidback, intricate, at times almost beautiful quality to them. Instead of power, Queens of the Stone Age focuses on repetition and establishing a groove. The power in a song like "How to Handle a Rope (A Lesson in the Lariat)" is in the steadiness of its beat and how the song builds upon it. Homme called this "robot rock," and wanted Queens to be instantly recognizable upon the repetition of a specific kind of earworm riff. Unlike a lot of later Queens albums, the musicianship would be the centerpiece with the lyrics taking a backseat. 

That's not to say that the lyrics are unimportant, but they, along with the vocals, seem to be garnish to the music rather than any kind of focal point. The most obvious example of this is in the mixing of the record. Homme has stated that he feels, going back and listening to the record, like there's an audible apprehension. At the time, he was much more reluctant to step into the position of frontman and vocalist, and so the fact that the vocal track is seemingly buried under the instrumentation seems to be a symptom of that. But the result of this is that the ear hooks onto those robot rock riffs more easily since that's where the emphasis is placed. Diving into the lyrics almost serves the music more than the writing, they reinforce the feel of the song more than the subject matter. "You Can't Quit Me Baby" creeps and stalks and lumbers uneasily, never truly finding steady footing and keeping the listener on their toes. Little wonder that the lyrics deal with a toxic relationship-turned-obsession with a morbid conclusion. 

That being said, the subject matters of the songs tend to be very fleeting themselves. Later Queens records wouldn't exactly lay their meanings out on a silver platter, but with the lyrics much more prominent as time went on, they invited and evoked much more vivid imagery. Here, the subjects are more abstract, they go into less detail, they leave more to the imagination, and they give just enough for the mind to race with a mystical possibility. "Mexicola" is about a trip south of the border, and yet I don't ever feel like I have a tight grasp on the full meaning behind what's being said, and that's much to the song's benefit. We don't get a story, we get fleeting images, images of "a world that's full of shit and gasoline" and "velvet eyes in Mexico." There's danger around every corner, and all you have to guide you is an unrelenting drum beat and one of the grimiest and dankest bass riffs ever committed to tape. 

Elsewhere, and really throughout the entire album, you see what started as a very interesting relationship between the band and one of their favorite subjects: drugs. Later albums would deal with that aspect very head-on, but here, Queens is very non-confrontational with the topic. A song like "Walkin' on the Sidewalks" talks about drug trips and "You Would Know" speaks of devils with pills in their eyes, but there's no real heed paid to it. The drugs are simply there, not good, not bad, simply a fact of life. Their subsequent album, Rated R, would start to more directly deconstruct the band's association with narcotics, and their third record, Songs for the Deaf, would very directly address the risks of being too close to these kinds of substances. Modern Queens records usually don't even address it at all anymore. Here, though, it's treated as nonchalantly and as commonplace as a rattlesnake in the desert: leave it be and it won't hurt you.

The musicianship in general is truly what should be admired here. The aformentioned "How to Handle the Rope" has easily the most evocative and fuzziest guitar intro on the record, and after just a couple repeats, ends up stuck in your head all day. The drum line teases its way into the song, and once it gets going, it drives forward like a beat up pickup truck racing down a desert highway. "Hispanic Impressions," one of a few instrumental songs on the record, is a cacophony of stuttering drum crashes and guitar riffs that hardly gives you a chance to breathe. If there was anything on the record to rival the power of Kyuss, this might be it. "Spider and Vinegaroons," with was added in a reissue along with "The Bronze" and "These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For," is a spacey and very ethereal number that drops you into a soundscape with a lone guitar and a steady clapping to lead you forward. There's a sense of scale and the smallness of the listener when putting this one on. It almost sounds like if Queens was hired to compose something for an episode of the Twilight Zone. A track mentioned earlier, "The Bronze," starts off similarly to "Spiders and Vinegaroons" in its spaciness, but then catches the listener off guard, whisking them away into a rush of guitar and a blast of hot desert air. A lot of the riffs evoke that kind of blast of dust-filled desert air. "The Bronze" comes pretty early in the tracklist, essentially an admission that one should never think they know what to expect from Queens, and that surprise is their modus operandi. 

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the closer, "I Was a Teenage Hand Model." Past the admittedly bizarre title is probably the strangest track on the record, a track which pretty music completely abandons guitar for what sounds like a looping maraca, some bass, and a healthy dose of very strange synthesized computer sounds occasionally bleeping, blooping, and piano. Every now and then, some strange synths play on the fringes of the track, teasing where the track leads, but for most of it, it's surprisingly laidback. It's also probably the clearest Homme's vocals are on the whole record. Of course, what he's singing doesn't really make much sense. By the time we get to the last minute or so of the song, we're completely taken aback once the electronics that have been hiding in the background come in and hijack the track, turning a slow jam into what sounds like some kind of alien transmission, pulsating throughout until we get to the carrot at the end of the stick: a short phone message from Nick Oliveri, Queens' soon-to-be bassist who joined the band shortly after the album came out. It's a strange little easter egg to hide at the end of this record, and it's a nod towards what the band was looking forward to. The band was about to extend beyond the admittedly-wide grasp they'd established here. Queens had differentiated themselves from their predecessor, but they were still dwelling in the same deserts that birthed Kyuss. Looking forward, they'd chart their own path. There's a lot of ambition in this debut. There's a set style that they want to adhere to, but every now and then, you can see something bigger itching to get out.