In this article I specifically wanted to comment on the fatal flaw of Tron Legacy that for me let down the movie as a whole. The film was (or if not, should have been) targeted at computer geeks and those with tech savvy.
In any film that is going to be watched by those in the know, one would think that some research would be done into the technical aspects of whatever it is that is being portrayed. Overall I found Tron Legacy to be a fantastic film and I was satisfactorily convinced by what I saw up until the ‘backdoor’ incident. following is a series of screens from where Sam is trying to hack into the computer that controls the laser and grid underneath the arcade.
First off, we see the screen that it starts off with showing the running time of the program: 20:11:20:16:22:14:3* The last two digits being milliseconds, followed by seconds, minutes, hours, days etc. I haven’t worked out what the first two represent, feel free to comment.
The next screen is Sam trying to log in to the system, his first attempt being ‘login -n root’. This fails and he says “Let’s try the backdoor” and to my shock and horror, he types ‘backdoor’ into the login screen and ‘hacks in’. This one scene made me cringe and weep, why not just get him to type in a bunch of numbers and characters that at least might be ambiguous rather that blatantly stupid. After that he then activates the laster by typing the the command of ‘LLLSDLaserControl -ok 1′.
Lets go back to the Encom office where Edward Dillinger is solving the problem of Sam’s little prank when he uploaded ‘Encom 12′ and replaced the file with a video of his dog.
This at least is plausible and happens fast enough to not see anything specific until you freeze frame it like I did. The first thing Edward types is ‘ps -ef | grep -i os12′ which is meant to call up the location of the os 12 file. The next screen that appears is interesting but too fast to see, though I have displayed it here. The next thing you see Edward type is ‘kill -9 17319′ which is then meant to end the process of the video that is annoyingly playing on the main screen.
Aside from that one major blunder of the ‘backdoor’ incident, the movie is otherwise a masterpiece and should definitely be watched by all.
Anyone who would like to comment or elaborate on the exact functions of these commands or anything else for that matter, please feel free to post your insights.
The first two numbers I suppose they’re years. 20 (years):11 (months): 20 days. This could be truth, considering it’s been 20 years since Kevin Flynn disappeared, right?
Yeah, that should have been obvious. Hadn’t really sunk in that it’s been 20 years.
Yeah, that part made me struggle a bit, too, I kind of wished there was a scene earlier in the movie like a flash back where Flynn told his son “If someone ever happens to me, just use the back door” kind of setup where it gave precedence to the forethought and then typing of that as a login.