“The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like?”

Thus begins Disney’s Tron: Legacy, the crusty baritone of Jeff Bridges rumbling lazily between programming genius Kevin Flynn and carefree slacker The Dude, who now seems to just be part of the actor’s persona. Thus also appears a remnant - a mere coffee stain - of the film it could have been, of a thought-provoking story whose intricacies were sanded down or simply ignored by standard Hollywood screenplay mangling.

I’ve always been fascinated by the ability of literature and film to tackle questions of philosophy. From Orwell’s dystopian vision of statism, to Lem’s musings on identity, to Herzog’s exploration of man and nature; stories have always had the power to act as tools for understanding reality. This, I believe, is the value of fiction. Escapism, while still kind of nice, is just a sugary coating.

It’s not hard to notice that most of our books and movies are basically 100% sugary coating with nothing in the center. Which is too bad, but it’s especially frustrating when you can tell that a movie could have had so much more substance, if only someone had the conviction to stick it out through dozens of market-driven rewrites (the true bane of forceful writing).

While the entire internet may have decided that Tron: Legacy is a boring pile of exploding nonsense, I actually quite enjoyed myself. But in retrospect, the movie I enjoyed was happening entirely in my head and not anywhere on the screen. In my mind, I was watching a film about the futility of perfectionism, the resilience of the chaotic universe, the power and accompanying weakness of the furiously singleminded, and countless other philosophical ideas that would have dovetailed very nicely with the events of the story if they had actually existed in the story at all.

If you haven’t noticed, I have a very active imagination.

So maybe Tron: Legacy, when taken at face value, actually does suck. But what of the unsprouted seeds littered across its gorgeously barren landscape? What about the ideas that could have been there, or maybe even were there in earlier drafts? What do you do with a film that does nothing intellectual on its own, but still has so much empty space where intellect could roam free?

If you’re like me, you sit and sputter and gesticulate, your mind shooting off in a hundred directions where the film idly glanced but should have plunged head-on:

The characters in the world of Tron are computer programs with an explicit purpose in life. Since each character is the personification of a goal or an ideal, their conflicts serve as illustrations of the conflicts between the ideas that define them.

A man in search of perfection creates a digital copy of himself whose goal is to create a perfect system, but the copy is in itself too perfect and too rigid to understand imperfection (the uncanny valley in CLU’s computer-generated likeness of Jeff Bridges mirrors the uncanny valley in his own perfection-obsessed philosophy).

The goofy jargon “isomorph” simply refers to a Hollywood vision of bottom-up computing; the idea of heuristic programs that use genetic algorithms and neural networks in order to increase their own complexity and grow into the tasks assigned to them. They are created without an explicit purpose, in direct contrast to the singleminded programs of the Grid, and mirror the resilience of life in its comparative imperfection.

While trapped in the Grid, Kevin Flynn comes to terms with the futility of his quest for flawlessness, embraces the childlike imperfection of the “isomorphs” (I’m sorry, that’s still a pretty silly word), and reaches a Zen-like understanding that the universe will do as it pleases, and one must always live in harmony with that. This contrasts with his earlier desire to impose his will upon everything in the Grid, which is of course manifested in CLU. Flynn is kind of a bodhisattva in that way.

You start thinking like that, and suddenly CLU turns into Nietzsche, Tron/Rinzler turns into an allegory for a half-dozen other things, and before you know it you’re shoehorning all kinds of otherwise valid philosophy into a Disney movie about neon motorcycles. Whoops.

Of course, none of this stuff appeared anywhere in the film. But the opportunity was there, and I think it’s a shame that no one seized it. Tron: Legacy could have been a really philosophical movie. The version that exists in my head is a really philosophical movie. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out where one ends and the other begins, so all I can do is hope that the next movie with this much potential actually goes ahead and taps it.