'Tron' tells spiritual story of Satan and salvation

In 1982, the original "Tron" dazzled with its special effects and built its neon landscape on the framework of a distinctly anti-communist, pro-Christian message – as the computer-world's creator came incarnate into a society where the collective sought to eradicate any belief in him, in order to control his creation.

With the making of the film's sequel, "Tron: Legacy," Hollywood built upon that … well … legacy with even more dazzling special effects, better moviemaking, surprisingly solid scriptwriting and a return to strong spiritual overtones.

But while the first film's spirituality was simply and distinctly Judeo-Christian, the sequel's theology is significantly more complex and much more of a mish-mash of religions.

Nonetheless, there's plenty of parallel to biblical truth in "Legacy," more than enough to prompt some intriguing discussions from this entertaining and well-made movie.

"Legacy" begins not long after its predecessor left off, as computer-programming genius Kevin Flynn explains to his son the marvelous digital world he has created within the network of the globe's computers, a utopia of free-flowing information, a land where – through some scientific mumbo-jumbo – people can actually visit and see the flow of computer programs as other sentient beings inside the computer's "grid."

His discoveries in this computer world, he says, are about to "reshape the human condition," change everything we know about science, medicine and even religion.

But then … Kevin Flynn disappears.

Fast-forward 21 years, and Kevin's son, Sam, has become a programming genius as well, but one wounded and demotivated over his father's disappearance. And then one day, as his father was before him, Sam gets suddenly sucked into the world of the "grid."

Fans of the first film will appreciate some of sequel's intentional references to the original; special effects connoisseurs will love the light-bike races (and groan over the poor computer graphics that make the "young" version of Kevin Flynn look like a character escaped from "The Polar Express"); and those new to the franchise will be simultaneously enraptured by the spectacle and slightly lost in the story (just like those who saw the first "Tron" in 1982).

The film gets really fascinating, however, when it begins to play with themes of faith.

Within the grid, for example, is a character who clearly and consistently portrays a metaphor for Satan. The greatest of all Flynn's creations, the digital being named Clu overthrows his creator – or "user," as the grid characters refer to humans – and sets himself up before the people as "your liberator, your illuminator, the one who vanquished the tyranny of the user."

Like the angel of light named Satan, who also seeks to overthrow his creator, Clu then repeats the same lie spoken in the Garden of Eden – that a selfish God was keeping the knowledge of good and evil from Adam and Eve, to keep this power and knowledge for himself – by explaining that his rebellion was really only about "ridding the grid of the false deity that sought to enslave us," saying, "Unlike our selfish creator, who kept the world to himself, I will make his world open, available to all of us."

You can almost hear the serpent's words from Genesis 3:5, "For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God."

In yet another scene, an effeminate, male sex-club owner, like a demon on the day of Jesus' crucifixion, dances over the beating of Sam Flynn, jeering, "Behold! The son of our maker!"

The bad guys in this film hold well to the biblical story.

The good guys, however, are a bit of a mixed bag. Just as the movie "The Matrix" cast the character Neo as sometimes a man in need of redemption and sometimes the redeemer of man, so too, the roles of the characters in "Legacy" get jumbled.

Father-figure Kevin Flynn, for example, is a flawed character, practices Zen Buddhism, says point-blank he made Clu "in his own image," and then claims he must – in a Taoist yin-yang sort of way – re-merge with Clu to destroy him.

The incarnate son of the creator, meanwhile, doesn't really play the role of the redeemer, a job reserved instead for a mysterious, deity-like, female character who instead is incarnated from the digital world to the human world. Her quest even leads her to risk death for the cause of salvation.

And yet, like Neo, she too was once redeemed, saying in a line dripping with biblical parallel, that when she awoke from her darkest day, "Standing above me was the creator. I guess you could say I was a rescue."

All in all, the role of redeemer seems to be passed off like a baton from one character to the next, rendering nearly all the movie's messianic metaphors thoroughly mixed.

There are several other spiritual parallels in the movie, but I'm running out of room for this review.

In the final summation, "Tron: Legacy" is a spectacle, a fun film and a spiritual head-scratcher that leaves plenty of avenues open to discuss the three biggest questions of any worldview – who is God, who is Man and what is the relationship between the two?

Content advisory:

This PG-rated film contains almost no foul language, only a small handful of minor profanities.
"Tron: Legacy" likewise contains very little sexuality, apart from the form-fitting electronic suits the characters wear. In the film's steamiest scene, four seductive ladies approach Sam, use lasers to strip him of his human clothes and "dress" him in his new "grid" suit, but there is no nudity, and the characters make no sexual contact. Sam is seen shirtless in one other scene. The club scene includes characters dancing, one couple kissing and an owner who says he can obtain all sorts of "diversions," but the inference is not backed up, as the film maintains its PG-rating.
There are scenes of violence in the film, including crashes, slicing, deaths, the severing of a limb and a gaping wound, but these are all in the digital realm, so instead of blood, the characters and wounds simply dissolve into random pixels, eliminating any real gore.
The film's religious and occult content is discussed extensively above and is limited to dialogue, though there's far more I haven't listed. For example, Kevin Flynn sits in a meditative stance, he speaks of "removing oneself from the equation" and "knocking on the sky and listening to the sound" and has a speech about how he found "gods" inside the grid. There's simply a lot of religious talk in the film, but frankly, very little of it makes sense outside the fantasy digital world created by the movie.