Walk with me, for a moment, through a mostly forgotten bit of pop-culture ephemera that has something to say to the present.
The 2010 science-fiction flick Tron: Legacy was mostly a box office disappointment, though not enough of one to preclude a reportedly dreadful sequel in 2025’s Tron: Ares. But 16 years after its release, it deserves a re-watch, not for any artistic merit but for the surprising currency of its ideas. Curiously, a film made mostly for a relatively undemanding Gen X male fan base (which is to say, the same people who drove the market for the desultory Star Wars movies and most of the tepid Marvel oeuvre) turns out to have been prescient for the age of artificial intelligence. It is especially so on the increasingly fraught topic of intelligences emerging from AI, which is, depending upon the source, either technological hallucinations or demons. The relevance of the dichotomy is unclear and probably irrelevant.
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