Portfolio - Jonathan Parry

8/2/2019 Portfolio - Jonathan Parry

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The splits in the foamboard narrow down the width of the one piece giving it the opportunity to bend,fold and double up to give it a simplistic wave like representational beauty.

Moulded funnels made from a natural substance like laster rather than a er are much better at

MATERIAL OPERATIONS

REPEAT ELEMENTS

EXTENDED SYSTEMS

A cut in a circular piece of paper allows it to have an advantage of exibility which lets it curl and wrapinto a cone with ease giving it symmetry and the power to bear a load.

JOINING OPERATIONS


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G.5 - Reinforced Concrete Floor SlabG.6 - Enclosed Roller BlindG.7 - Timber BatonG.8 - Painted Plaster Board

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GROVER & ALLENISSUE #1 DECEMBER 2011

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JDWETHERSPOON

RUN A MILEGROVER & ALLEN TEAM RUN A MILE FOR CHARITY CLICSARGENT GROVER & ALLEN TEAM RUN A MILE FORCHARITY CLIC SARGENT GROVER & ALLEN TEAM RUN AMILE FOR CHARITY CLIC SARGENT GROVER & ALLEN TEAMRUN A MILE FOR CHARITY CLIC SARGENT GROVER & ALLENTEAM RUN A MILE FOR CHARITY CLIC SARGENT GROVER &ALLEN TEAM RUN A MILE FOR CHARITY CLIC SARGENTGROVER & ALLEN TEAM RUN A MILE FOR CHARITY CLICSARGENT GROVER & ALLEN TEAM RUN A MILE FORCHARITY CLIC SARGENT GROVER & ALLEN TEAM RUN A

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HAS SCIENCE FICTION TRAVELLED FURTHER INTO DYSTOPIA

IN THE PAST 28 YEARS?


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Dystopia: An imaginary place where people leaddehumanised and often fearful lives. [ merriam-webster.com,2011 ]

Utopia: a place of ideal perfection especially in laws,

government, and social conditions [ merriam-webster.com,2011 ]

Fade In:

Pr e m is e

Through investigation the main focus will be on how filmshave progressed into showing the world in a moredystopian view or if they are trying to see the light atthe end of the tunnel, creating a world that would be amore pleasant to live in. Although the main comparison isbetween Tron (1982) and Tron: Legacy (2010), Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999) will also be referenced toshow where the film industry is/was heading in terms ofcreating dystopian films. Are science-fiction filmsbecoming more or less pessimistic about the future? Dothe social concerns and scenery have an active role increating a dystopian/ utopian film?

visions of the future in the films he discusses aredeeply pessimistic, and that the dystopias ofcontemporary science fiction mirror the profound social

decay we are experiencing [Kuhn, 1990. p16 ]

In science fiction, a place or setting assumes a specialsignificance.Science fiction was initially introduced in literatureand it is here that Sci-fi films trace their roots backto their parent of creating a utopian/ dystopian place.Sci-fi literature is about non-existent places,impractical, idealistic schemes generally for socialand/or political reform. Sci-Fis attitude towards theseplaces shifts between idealism and pessimism, the mostcommon plot being where something or someone intrudescausing disruption therefore starting or creating thechain to becoming a dystopian novel. Within film andespecially within sci-fi films a place where the storyunfolds carries an expressive weight, as its function isto create the setting as well as give emotion there bycreating a mise-en-scene. At the same time, the placeacts as a pure vision, a display for the accomplishmentof the art department and special effects.

S cen e 1.

The year 1926 was the first time when science fictionleapt from literature into modern film (the use of soundalong with moving pictures).The first science fiction feature to do this wasMetropolis . Metropolis used its narrative to explore thesocial structure and setting of architectural design andorganisation. These became highly overlapped.Within one level of Metropolis , it initiates a continuingstrand of cinematic science fiction where imaginedplaces, future cities and in particular composed settingsare set for its narrative action.Even where the towering figures of a cityscape offer asa little as a mere backdrop, the backdrop is neverentirely neutral. At the very least, its visibility addsa layer of cultural meaning and influential reference toevents in the story.The cinematic visions of Sci-Fi and its utopias anddystopias tend to reflect on social and politicalquestions. Even if the social and political issues arenot approache d within the film, Sci-Fi cityscapesconstantly invoke cultural meanings. An example ofinvoking a cultural meaning would be how scie ntificprogress is associated with urban decay, nuclearholocaust, and other obsessions.Sci-Fi film was most definitely not pas sive when it hadthe invitation to take the opportunity to imagine/create cityscapes and use their criticism to showcontemporary modes of social organisation.

Obvious role of architecture in the construction of sets(and the eager participation of architects themselves inthis enterprise) , and the equally obvious ability of filmto construct its own architecture in light and shade,scale and movement, allowed from the outset for a mutual

intersection of these two spatial arts [ Vidler, 1993.p44 ]

Sc e n e 2.

In the essay, Race, space and Class: The Politics ofCityscapes in Sci-Fi Films by David Desse r, he gives thefeeling of criticism of genre by se tting out to use ahistorical overvie w of cities in Sci-Fi cinema. He beginsby analysing the representation of a social classdivision that can be represented in and upper city/ lowercity divide, which, is found in the text Metropolis .Dessers essay about Sci-Fi cinema cityscapes closes withthe film Blade Runner , this is a film that has a

statement about the divide of power and their relation,he suggests that Blade Runner is an intertextual reworkof Metropolis in significant ways in that it brings a

focus on to the political questions of both race andsocial class.

Blade Runner (1982) is a typical example of one of the1980s grunge-pits. Loosely based around Philip K. DicksDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner isabout a cop specialised in tracking down Replicants(Humanoid), he has recently retired but is forced backinto his job due to six exiled Replicants escaping froman off-world colony and returning to earth.The architecture in this film is the dominating factor insetting the dystopian vibe into place. Firstly we are metwith the ground level, these multicultural street scenesare dominated by a vast amount of East Asian imagery andwe get the sense that this is considered to be theeconomically less fortunate/ working class area (Fig.1).Everyone that can afford to has moved off planet, thisemulates the White Flight era where whites were movingto the suburbs, out of the urban community where theminorities of the population were constantly increasingin size.

Fig.1

Social concerns and trends are reflected in mass media

such as film and television [Kuhn, 1990. p15 ]

Los Angeles, 2019 is most certainly not an icon ofcareful progressive planning as a result of this there isa sense of chaos and disorder that has evolved throughtime due to its irrational style and internationalimprint. The main design thoughts to the buildings thatthey have only been updated with the times by randomlyattaching the new bits of building, showing the evolutionbut also the devolution as stated above there is noevidence of a well thought out plan. If it were to be of

a utopian standing then the city would most likelycontain wider streets, signs of luxuriousness and wouldalso be clean, however the streets are claustrophobic anddue to the narrow lanes it emphasises the height of the

buildings around (Fig.2). The only signs you get ofpossible luxury is when you see Dr. Tyrells apartment atthe top of the city, this supports the notion of a dividebetween upper and lower classes (as seen in Metropolis ).

Fig. 2

It is as though we were training ourselves, in advance,for the stereotypical dystopian rigors of overpopulation in a world in which no-one has a room of their own anymore, or secrets anybody cares about in the first

place [Jameson, 1992. p11 ]

The art of advertising is a constant background here itsparticularly manipulative being the size of buildings andalso being incorporated onto blimps, which replicatessimilar feelings of being in Times Square or DowntownTokyo. LA is unceasingly dark and rainy, this spectacletells us there is an abundance of pollution andenvironmental damage, the elements that display this isthat there are no trees or greenery and real animals havebecome rare so they are replaced by replicants.Blade Runner does not have an evident sign of authorityor government other than the local police, the absence ofauthority makes the city fairly anarchic, its thedifferent end of the scale to other visions of the futuresuch as The Matrix and the totalitarianism of Big Brotherin Michael Radfords representation of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) .

the 1970s and early 1980s has been a period of unendingand deepening social and economic crisis, and visions of the future projected in Anglo-American SF films duringthis period have been overwhelmingly pessimistic

[Franklin, 1990. p20 ]

The social and economic crisis that appears in BladeRunner is from the fear of an expanding Asia, distinctly

the then thriving economic power of Japan and itspurchasing of New York real estate. This lead to anxietyover immigration and its increasing influence on the USA,threatening the American way of life.This social aspect could come from the development ofcities like Los Angeles over the past century that werebecoming mega-cities as they had no recognisable centralpoint and are actually like a mini-state with severalcenters. This worried particularly the working classwith the thought that the government was losing controlover the city due to its large gang related problems andhow they could not easily be tackled because they had noreal center to congregate.

If archaeologists can infer something of the characterof a society from a few shards, certainly visions of the

future created by large groups of highly skilled people

armed with advanced technology, financed by millions of

dollars, of behalf of giant corporations, intended tomake handsome profits by enticing the cost of expensive

tickets from masses of consumers, must reveal something

about the character of our own society. Of course they

mirror the profound social decay we are experiencing.Obviously some of them are also meant as warnings

[Franklin, 1990. p31 ]

Sc e n e 3.

The essay Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Sci-FiFilm, by Vivian Sobchack considers the cityscapes in Sci-Fi films as poetic images with an affective power whichbinds the phenomenon of an actual urban experience. Inher historical and phenomenological description of Sci-Ficityscapes, Sobchack revisits a long tradition ofvisualisations of cities in Sci-Fi films, following ashift from the utopian cravings of the 1920s and 1930s tothe grunge-pits of the 1980s and 1990s. She notes thatthe use of special effects in cinematic experiences andthe application of effects such as morphing and warping inthe digital aspect have the capacity to lesson thefamiliarisation of space which, in turn, affects theunstable experience offered by a number of recent Sci-Fifilms.

The Matrix is based around a notion that the world thatwe live in is in fact a simulation of how our world usedto look before the war with machines started.It is said to be unknown as to who actually started thewar but it is know that it was humans who blackened thesky of the real world. This is because the machines

relied of solar energy, now however (as shown in the film)our once glorious city is a derelict wasteland/ desertand the city of the machines now thrives after incubating

human bodies to harvest their alternative energy source(bioelectric energy)(Fig.3).

Fig. 3

The message behind The Matrix is designed to look at howwe live. We are born into a form of captivity, where CCTVis constantly watching our every move outside and in somecases inside our homes. We have rules, regulations all ofwhich are set down by a more powerful being that webelieve in as it is fed to us from the very start of ourlives, such as the government or a religion. ThomasMerton (Author/ Poet) once stated Propaganda makes up ourmind for us, but in such a way that it leaves us thesense of pride and satisfaction of men who have made up their own minds. And in the last analysis, propagandaachieves this effect because we want it to. This is oneof the few real pleasures left to modern man: thisillusion that he is thinking for himself when, in fact,someone else is doing his thinking for him .

Science fiction films concerning fears of machines or of technology usually negatively affirm such social values

as freedom, individualism and the family [Ryan & Kellner,1990. p58 ]

Imagery that conveys these thoughts is in multipleinstances within The Matrix .One particular image that comes to mind is where thehuman fields are first revealed to us, Neo is awakened inthe Real World to come face to face with colossalcylindrical buildings each imprisoning hundreds uponthousands of human beings within individual pods (Fig.4).A little later in the film Neo is then subjected tolooking at how the City of the Real looks, which as saidabove, is a derelict space where the buildings havecrumbled not too dissimilar in looks from the ruins ofSydney at the end of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome(1985) (Fig.5).

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

The apocalyptic imagination had already burst forth into

film with images of catastrophe in all shapes from the

ery likely thermonuclear holocaust to absurd projections

of the human race being overcome by even the most

harmless life forms [Franklin,1990. p19 ]

Within these two stills and within the particular messagebehind The Matrix , it is put it into the category of a

dystopian film. Following on from looking at the above an

experiment was introduced to see if there was a

scientific way of supporting the ideology of The Matrix being a dystopian film. The length of time where a dark

scene within the film occurs and ends will be recorded,

then they will all be added together and divide them by

the length of the film to receive a percentage.Altogether it was found that there is 1 hour 8 minutes

and 23 seconds equaling to 55% of the whole film that

shows dark/ gloomy footage. One may be thinking that

this is a small percentage, which in that circumstance it

is. But this percentage can be increased quite

dramatically as although the recordings show only thedark scenes there are many lighter scenes that have beenwashed out by using a green filter, which gives everyonea green tinted grey suit/ dress and removes all the realskin tones leaving it dull and unreal. The only time youget the true skin tones, fabric colours and a sense ofreality is when the characters are either out of TheMatrix or you are in the home of The Oracle.Another aspect is the architecture in The Matrix thatcertainly adds to the feeling of dystopia both in andoutside of The Matrix . The city within the computersimulation is made to not look like any particular citymuch like Blade Runner (Fig.6)

Fig. 6

The city of Blade Runner is not the ultra modern, but

the postmodern city The city is called Los Angeles, but

it is an LA that looks very much like New York, Hong

Kong, or Tokyo. We are not presented with a realgeography, but an imaginary one: a synthesis of mental

architectures, of topoi [Bruno, 2008. p178 ]

Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban

island, a sea in the middle of a sea, lifts up the

skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich,

then rises again to the crests of Midtown A wave of

erticals [Certeau, 2008. p178 ]

As Henry Jenkins similarly stated, here De Certeau seemsto be fascinated with a false sense of totality/ seeingthe whole that has been created by the extreme high-angleshot (Fig.7), a gods eye view, giving the cityscape itsunending sense of scale.

Fig. 7

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is

to be lift out of the cities grasp [Jenkins, 2008. p179 ]

Other shots within the film aid the extreme high-angle bymoving a little bit closer to the ground, we see eithershots that look straight up at the skyscrapers that loomabove (particularly the scene where we see empty shellsraining down from the helicopter)(Fig.8) or straight downfrom the rooftops where we view the human activity belowas though we are peering into an ant farm (Fig.9).

Inviting us to marvel at the verticality of the urban

canyon [Jenkins, 2008. p180 ]

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Sc e ne 4 .

Future Noir: Contemporary Representations of VisionaryCities, by Janet Staiger, Staiger takes a different pathtowards the questions of intertextuality and thecityscapes within Sci-Fi cinema. Staiger searches for themeanings to Sci-Fis virtual cityscapes not within thehistory of Sci-Fi itself or in modern society, but in theinstances of the real-worlds urban social change,utopian architecture and progressive town planning.Examples of work such as progressive town planning arethe Garden City by Sir Ebenezer Howards and RadiantCity by Le Corbusier, these are/ were imagined anddesigned with the thought of enriching peoples lives.In Stagiers essay, she discusses and identifies a seriesof iconographic patterns, which are culturally associatedwith utopian visions and are used/ quoted in the films,but with a level of irony. As such, future noir filmsdraw upon and quote from a library of cultural images ofprogress in the cities, whilst at the same time expressloss in faith at the idealism from which these imagesfirst came from.The cities of Sci-Fi films provide the settings andsubject material for the narratives. They invoke cravingfor much better ways of organising their society, or theyexpress fears about the decay, danger and degeneration inthe public realm. They may even recycle or refer toimages of the city from earlier forms of Sci-Fi. At thesame time these spaces/cities are built as places for theviewer to enter and explore, as well as question theviewer.

Tron (1982) is about a Hacker/arcade owner Kevin Flynn whois desperate to prove that a former employee/ co-workerEd Dillinger, who now is a senior executive at ENCOM, infact stole his best videogames to pass them off as beingdesigned by himself. Flynn's efforts to reveal the truthhowever are disrupted by ENCOM's all powerfulmegalomaniac Master Control Program. One night, the

M.C.P catches Flynn during his attempted hack and decidesto pull him into the virtual world by digita lly breakinghim down through a data stream and reconstructs him inthe internal program . During his time here Flynndiscovers that the M.C.P is making life on The Grid(virtual world) just as, if not more, miserable than inthe real world. Both wor lds only hope lie in Flynn andTron s ( Tron = independent system security program) handsas they search to destroy the M.C.P to bring back orderto both the real and virtual worlds.Most of Tron is set on The Grid and we dont really get alook at the outside world ap art from the beginning of thefilm and then small scenes through the film lasting 2minutes approximately . The image that the viewerperceives of the real world is a da rk one as filming isall done at night up until the last scenes.

The colour scales we get in the real world c onsist mainlyof blacks and greys due to the night shooting b ut we alsoget whites and small elements of colour like blues andreds. The whites come purely from the fluorescentlighting in the Laser Room as the offices at ENCOM, thecolours within come fro m parts such as the safety helmetsin the ENCOM building, there is a rogue colo ur seen ataround 8 minutes and 21 second s there is a red lightingdetail/ graphic on the ENCOM helicopter. This shows thelink between the virtual world and the real wo rld, as thetwo are currently intertwined due to Dillinger the M.C.P.The viewer sees a lot more colours in Flynns ar cade anddue to the laughter and enjoyment seen here they get thefeeling that this is like a safe haven. On The Grid thecolour scales we get are a mirr or of the ones we get inthe real world, the sky is black, the buildings ar egrey/blue blocks and ther e are units of blues, reds andgreen, these colours are seen generally a s light stripsthat appear on a programs clothing.

films are seen either as mirroring attitudes, trends andchanges in society (social preoccupations), or as

expressing the collective psyche of an era [ Kuhn, 1990.p16 ]

The catalyst of social concern thats indicated throughTron is how technology is moving ahead at an ala rmingpace, and how the workplace is becoming more crampe dthrough the introduction of office cubes and alsouninviting due to the lack of natural light thatpenetrates the general staffs workspace. CCTV plays a partin the underlying message in Tron , as it was between the70s and 80s that CCTV was starting to b e implemented intocities to aid the prevention of cr ime. However manypeople saw this as the start to the invasion of priv acy,which relates to the ever watching Big Brother fromGeorge Orwells classic book 1984. Another area of concern

is the emerging consciousness or our effec t upon theenvironment. Starting around the late 70s and through the

80s, the news about what is happening to the planet isfinally beginning to get through, after only being asmall concern of the progressive times through the 60sand early 70s.

Apart from attempting to stimulate something of thefeeling of experiencing architecture, the recent developments in computer-aided design systems, togetherwith the creative leaps of the imagination in the wake of Star Wars (1977), have opened up a whole new area for

films on architecture [Grigor, 1993 p. xxix ]

Architectur e within the real world of Tron is nodifferent to how a city looks tod ay, there are a fewskyscrapers in the cityscape with horizontal planningsurrounding them, but it is the ENCOM build ing that isthe most dominant structure, which emphasises theirdomination on contro lling The Grid and in the computingsoftware market off The Grid. The architecture on The Gridmay be uncomplica ted in that it is just a series of plainextruded bloc ks but even still there is an overwhelmingfeeling by the buildings around. At several intervalsfrom high-angled shots, much like those in The Matrix wesee a maze like structure that covers a vast a mount ofthe surface that seems to have no end acro ss the screen(Fig.10). The size of the walls within this canyon isexpressed extremely well and in the most simple way, allyou can see is a black backgr ound with thin white linescutting through it showing where the walls start fro m thefloor. To show the scale of them compared to a program wesee the Light Cycles containing Flynn, Tron and Ra mmoving around the landscape (Fig.11).Conducting the experiment with Tron was a lot differentfrom The Matrix . Tron is predominantly a dark film, 90%of the film is of dark scenes, and the remaining 10% oflight scenes does not fully count for imagery containingnatural light. 9.4% is where the film is shot inside ofthe ENCOM building and the light that we are seeing isthe fluorescent lighting. 0.6% of the film (the last 54seconds) is the only time that we actually see anysunlight, as this is the only time the suns hine reallygives off the iconography of a fresh start and thateverything is rectified in the world.

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Sce n e 5 .

Comparing the recent Tron: Legacy (2010) with the originalTron (1982) you can start to see significant changes inhow the social concerns are follow a slightly differentroute, the architecture is more dominating, right down tothe simplest item, the script.Sam Flynn is a rebellious 27 year old; he is haunted bythe mysterious disappearance of his father Kevin Flynn.When Sam is told about a pager message from his fathersent from the old Flynn's Arcade, he decides toinvestigate. Sam then finds himself transported onto TheGrid, where he later finds Kevin who has been trapped inthe virtual world for 20 years. With the help of Quorra(the last Isotope), father and son set out on the quest toreach the portal back to the real world. The virtualworld created by Kevin now has far more advancedvehicles, weapons and landscapes; the only thing thatstands in their way is CLU.

we faced these forces as alien po wers which weourselves had created slipping out of our control and

threatening to wipe us off the planet [Franklin, 1990p19 ]

Political and social concerns in Tron: Legacy are about ananti-fascist movement as well as the challengingcapitalism. The dictato r that they rise up against isCLU; he is intent on raging a war against imperfec tionstriving towards the creation of a perfect world . CLU hascleansed the whole system, which has left a despera te andmiserable world . Flynn set him the task of creating the

perfect system when they started building Utopia [ KevinFlynn, 55m19 ]. Flynn hoped to find control, order andperfection within the system; something that is vaca ntwithin the real world, he found this perfec tion in theIsos (Isomorphic Algorithms) who had superior knowledge.He planned on bringing them back to reality before CLUintervened and destro yed them, as they did not fit in hisperfect system. The message behind Tron is there is noway of creating perfection, especiall y not in a fascistway as it rids us of our humanity, our compassion/humiliation in a social aspect and political aspec t.The capitalism issue they are comb ating in the film, seenthrough the high-tech company ENCOM are changing thereethos, which used to be giving students/ school s andhospitals free or discounted softwa re. This era has

anished due to the board of directors seizing contro l ofthe company after Kevin Flynns disappeara nce. This issuewas particularly big during the 80s and was reflected inmany films, however the matter is still quite major toda yas students cannot affor d most of the software they needthis results in a constant battle between the two overillegal download ing.

while reflecting a dreadful contemporary reality, can atleast be critical of that reality. Alien (1979), BladeRunner (1982) and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)all explore the relationship between high-tech corporatecapitalism. the films are engaged in a debate about

present day society [Kuhn, 1990. p17 & 18 ]

Much like the original Tron , the colour scales we get inthe real world consist mai nly of blacks and greys due tothe night filming however we do get elements of theprimary colou rs in clothing such as blues and reds. UponThe Grid the colour sca le is exactly the same howeverthere are a lot more whites as these are used forcreating bounda ries/ details, such as the sides of theroads to the outlines and detailing of the buildings.Apart from the white detailing and due to the conditionsTron: Legacy is a dystopian film. The author ity that we

witness in the real world is lacking as we only see it

within security guards and a few policemen, on The Grid

authority and control is extremely high as within thefirst minute of being on The Grid Sam is picked up by thepolice as he is thought to be another stray program.

The style of city in the real world has not changed much

since the original Tron , the cityscape is still fairlyhorizontal rather than mainly vertical. The only building

that seems to have changed is ENCOM, the fact that this

is now referred to as the ENCOM Tower suggests that it is

the most dominating structure in the cityscape,demonstrating its gain of more power over the city and

the computer/ software industry. Upon The Grid the

cityscape has changed a lot from its predecessor, as

stated previously there is more detail allowing you tounderstand what each building is and the scale of the

buildings are far greater. The heightened sense of scale

is shown in several ways, dominating the cityscape there

is a monumental spire like structure, which is central tothe city as it is the controlling tower where CLU

resides. Another way that defines the scale is after Sam,

Kevin and Quorra visit a program called Zeus for help,

they are seen in an elevator plunging down the side ofone of the tallest towers, instead of crashing into the

city level Kevin manages to access and open several

service doors that lead below the surface before coming

to a halt at the actual base of the tower.

The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to pictureclusters of information as they moved through thecomputer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles?Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a

world I thought I'd never see. [ Kevin Flynn, Tron:Legacy. Time: 30s-54s ]

S cen e 6

As time has moved through the past 28 years, the science

fiction world evidently has become more pessimistic.

They all show a dystopian cityscape, which generallyreflects the anxieties of the affluent, suburban, white

middle class. Each views their immediate environment as

dangerous, chaotic and unstable. However as time went on

each put their own twist on the matter and displayed itin the most dystopian way that technology would allow

them to.

the implications that films can be either reactionary orprogressive; and that this is culturally important

because films shape, as well as reflect, the ways we

think about the world [Kuhn, 1990. p18 ]

By the end of Tron it seems as though both the real andvirtual worlds are entering a Utopian state as the M.C.P

has been destroyed and all of the programs within arefree to do what they have been programmed to do, also

back in the real world Kevin Flynn has been instated as

the head of ENCOM due to finding the file that showed

Flynn as the true creator of the games. However if werefer back to Thomas Mertons quote then it shows that

the programs upon The Grid are not entering into a utopian

world, as there is still have a level of control over

them through the real world as they have been programmedby their users to do specific things, have a certain

purpose.

However in observation of both Tron and Tron: Legacy itis evident that Tron: Legacy has put forward a slightlymore dystopian future than its predecessor. It carries

similar if not the same values as the original but to put

it in a darker state in terms of the story, the evidence

is set out within the first scenes of the film as the

world was thrown back into chaos as Kevin Flynn hadmysteriously disappeared due to being held hostage inside

his own creation. His son ended up having to be raised by

his grandparents, the loss of his father lead to him

becoming a deviant and his fathers company performed a180 degree turn from giving software away for free to

charging extortionate amounts for it.

The storyline for Tron: Legacy may be a bit moredisheartening but where the film really shows off itsthoughts on dystopia is through technological advances,

particularly in CGI. The blending of the human form with

electrical/ computer circuit symbols gives Tron an edge,showing that the integration of the two aids the film ingiving it a bleak look on the future. The CGI also allows

Tron: Legacy to have a lot more substance and detail inits visual representations. This allows it to show a more

dystopian city with the use of lightning and dark cloudsupon a black sky compared to Tron s plain black sky.

Each film conveys that within the past 28 years it boils

down to how and where technology is evolving. Technologyseems to constantly be going wrong and turning against

their creators (Tron, Terminator, The Matrix, Tron:Legacy). Technology is the main theme to a Sci-Fi film, sono matter where we are or how far into the future we go,the technology is going to be the key to creating a

dystopian world.

Fade Out.

-End-

Portfolio - Jonathan Parry

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