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Tag: movies

  • Only an (AI) God Can Save Us?

    Only an (AI) God Can Save Us?

    Last Friday, my son and I attended the opening night of Tron: Ares, the third installment in the Disney computer movie franchise. (The CGI one, not The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.) Readers of this blog are well aware of my somewhat irrational 80s-kid love for the 1982 Tron and its 2010 sequel, Tron: Legacy, so it’s no surprise that I would be on hand for its opening night, watching it in IMAX 3D, no less.

    Having watched it, I can say that while Tron: Ares is certainly a sensory spectacle, it isn’t the strongest film in the franchise, which, depending on your feelings about the first two movies, may not be saying much. Behind the sunny optimism that prevails at the end of Tron: Ares is a bleak counsel of desperate surrender in the face of the very forces that are pulling the world apart.

    ***

    Warning: Spoilers for the movie follow.

    As Tron: Ares opens, we find that ENCOM, the software company featured in the 1982 and 2010 films, is locked in a technological race with recently spawned competitor, Dillinger Systems. Both companies are in a race to develop technology that will allow them to synthesize virtually any object using modified versions of the particle lasers that, in the first two films, beam people into the virtual world. The lasers work like 3D printers, printing everything from orange trees to super-hardened military hardware, and they can even create embodied real-world avatars of programs akin to the ones that populate the virtual world of “the Grid,” the long-standing designation in the Tron universe for the inner world located inside computer networks.

    There is one catch to this amazing synthesizing technology, though: both companies have hit a theoretical limit for how long their creations can endure in the real world. After twenty-nine minutes, the created objects, no matter how simple or complicated they are, crumble into pixelated dust.

    However, ENCOM and its young CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee), have an advantage: they know where to find the “Permanence Code” that would allow these synthesized objects to last indefinitely. Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the whiny, temperamental CEO of ENCOM rival Dillinger Systems, desperate to win lucrative military contracts, will stop at nothing to get the Permanence Code from Kim. So, Dillinger fires up his 3D-printing laser matrix, works up avatars of his master control program, Ares (Jared Leto), and Ares’ chief lieutenant, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), and sends them to collect the code from Kim. (In twenty-nine minutes or less, of course.)

    Here, though, Ares begins to have realizations that Dillinger didn’t prepare for. Ares is an AI computer program, and in the course of his training (since our current expectations of AI is that it has to be trained iteratively) he has developed curiosity about the real world as well as feelings, and more than anything a desire to be something more than just a program carrying out the imperatives of Dillinger. Dillinger, though, makes it clear that however much he values Ares’s support, he views Ares himself as expendable, and Dillinger obtaining the Permanence Code will not change that. So, rather than execute Dillinger’s order, Ares abruptly changes sides and joins forces with Kim to keep the Permanence Code out of Dillinger’s hands.

    Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn lives (sort of).

    After a fairly convoluted series of events, which include Kim and ENCOM beaming Ares into the preserved Grid from the original 1982 Tron (silly but fun for the fans) and becoming himself imbued with the Permanence Code by the preserved avatar of no less than Kevin Flynn himself (Jeff Bridges, reprising his role in the first two Tron films with the same gee-whiz tics he’s been using since 1982), Ares returns to the real world as a messianic figure. The change registers visually by the neon highlights on Ares’s suit turning from red to white, much like Gandalf the Grey returning from the other side of death as Gandalf the White. But the movie has tried to telegraph this messianic moment from the very beginning; Jared Leto’s Ares spends the entire film with shoulder-length hair and a beard that makes him look like a youth pastor at a seeker-sensitive church cosplaying Jesus, after all. Permanence Ares, together with Kim, ultimately save the day, Dillinger’s world crumbles around him, and order is restored. Kim and ENCOM go on to use the Permanence Code to synthesize, not military hardware and supersoldiers, but instead things that solve the problems of humanity—feeding the hungry, curing cancer, things like that. All’s well that ends well!

    ***

    There is a certain techno-optimism baked into the basic premise of all of the Tron movies that is hard to maintain in the enshittified world of 2025. In this sense, Tron: Ares is as much a victim of the desperately long timeframe it took to move from development to production as anything. Older, more quaint techno-optimism notwithstanding, the core of the thematic appeal (such as it is) of the first two movies is a search for transcendence beyond technology. At the core of the original Tron movie is the struggle against the nakedly totalitarian Master Control Program, whose mission is to usurp the role of the human users and to bend all computer programs to its will. (True to its roots in the Cold War Reagan-era United States, Tron represents the MCP as ideologically bent on destroying the “religion” of the users, much like the aims of the religion-destroying Soviet Union as reflected in Western propaganda. The MCP’s lieutenants and minions even glow red.) Tron and Flynn win out over the MCP and hence restore the natural subservience of program to user to the Grid. The “religion of the user” flourishes once again, and programs are once again just useful tools for humans to use.

    Sark from the 1982 Tron (David Warner) is an apparatchik for the techno-Stalinist MCP.

    Tron: Legacy takes the same theme in a new direction. Now it is Kevin Flynn, the hero of Tron, who has succumbed to the proto-totalitiarian impulse to create what he terms the “perfect system” that will (somehow) help humanity to overcome the imperfections of the real world. He disappeared in 1989, leaving behind his son, Sam Flynn, to grow up fatherless and alienated. In the course of following up clues as to his father’s ultimate whereabouts, Sam learns where his father is, why he left, and what he has learned in the course of his enforced captivity inside his own Grid. He has learned that his desire to implement the perfect system, implemented by sentient program Clu, was chimerical because it led him to devalue his relationship with Sam and to abandon the imperfect, but irreplaceable, real world. It also led to the destruction of the Isos, “isomorphic algorithms” which spontaneously and unexpectedly manifest within the Grid, showing Flynn that perhaps the messy imperfection he sought to repress is ineliminable from even the Grid itself. Of all the Tron movies, Tron: Legacy comes closest to speaking to the social pathologies of current Big Tech while at the same time portraying a set of humans with legible, human-sized motivations and struggles.

    The trajectory of Ares from Dillinger’s master control program to messianic program at large in the real world is, I think, meant to explore a similar theme to that of Flynn’s enlightenment in Legacy. The problem, though, is that Tron: Ares underdevelops the theme. Some of that is due to Jared Leto’s limited acting range: he plays Ares with the flat affect of HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey and doesn’t let us into Ares’ internal conflict. The real limitation of Tron: Ares, though, is that Ares’ enlightenment and defection is just one more plot point in the service of, at bottom, a straightforward, but utterly overstuffed, white-hat/black-hat techno-Western. The movie rarely gets a chance to breathe, to allow us to sit with the characters and develop any sense of what is at stake for them, and for us as the audience. In the midst of all this, Ares remains ultimately a handsome cipher with fearsome combat skills. Mindless wall-to-wall action is fine if you’re in a Fast and Furious movie that isn’t even trying to be credible. But for all its winks and nods to the Tron nostalgists out there, Tron: Ares ultimately lacks any sense of humor about itself.

    What is really at stake in Tron: Ares is, despite the title, not Ares—his trajectory is really just a sideshow—but instead a struggle between two tech CEOs for corporate dominance. If you’re a tech CEO, I guess that plot really speaks to you, but otherwise, not so much. Of course, the movie seeks to engineer our loyalties at every turn. ENCOM, the white hats of the piece, are the geeky, fun, diverse company who is seeking the Permanence Code to help solve the world’s problems. Eve Kim is not only a nice, relatable woman, but is also grieving her dead sister and trying to use the Permanence Code to further cancer research in her sister’s memory. ENCOM’s color palette is all warm blues and its design sense is curvilinear and organic. Dillinger Systems, by contrast, is all angry reds, blacks, and grays and boxy, angular, spiky designs. Julian Dillinger is a peevish brat with a genuinely unhealthy relationship with his domineering mother (Gillian Anderson, trying her level best with this part),[1] and Dillinger wants the Permanence Code to develop a next generation of unstoppable weapons of war and supersoldiers.

    The difference between our protagonists and their spheres of influence is not remotely subtle. And yet, they are both ultimately just tech CEOs struggling for corporate advantage. We are supposed to derive comfort from the fact that the good CEO wins out over the bad CEO. But at the end of the day it’s all just CEOs—and of course, Permanence Ares, who ends the movie wandering Mexico on a motorcycle learning about human life. Nice work if you can get it.

    It’s hard to derive much solace in 2025, though, from a movie that tells us that the only thing that can stop a bad tech CEO is a good tech CEO. We are living through the reality that there really aren’t any good tech CEOs, certainly none with the power and influence wielded by the real-life analogues of Julian Dillinger. Instead of the messianic promise of AI becoming sentient like Ares and trying to affect a rapprochement between the imperatives of technological growth and the claims of humanity, we have people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel who have thrown their lot in with authoritarian government, genocide, and carbon-induced climate disaster. We even have Thiel giving private, secretive lectures which, in the absence of any historical or theological evidence or warrant, claims that opponents of AI are servants of the antichrist. It’s hard to be celebratory about the actual state of AI technology; far from curing cancer and synthesizing orange trees on the Alaskan tundra, it’s turning most of the Internet into a soup of misinformation and poorly written slop, jacking up electricity prices, and hastening our ongoing climate catastrophe, all to help college students cheat on writing assignments and to save mid-level office workers a few minutes a day in writing meaningless reports.

    Tron: Ares has precisely nothing to say to any of these actual problems. That would be fine if it were just a big dumb action flick. But it isn’t; whether it wants to be or not, it’s a film about tech CEOs and AI screening in 2025 in a world set on fire in large part by the very forces it celebrates. It’s impossible not to have a sense of the tonal disconnect between the sunny world at the end of this movie and the one in which we find ourselves, and it’s hard to swallow the answer this movie proposes, which is the non-choice choice of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan:Don’t like your absolute ruler? Start again with a new absolute ruler and hope for the best!

    ***

    In 1966, Martin Heidegger, the first Nazi rector of Freiburg University and also an influential philosopher, consented to an interview with the German newsweekly Der Spiegel in which he agreed to break his longstanding silence about his complicity with the Nazi regime. In the interview, only published five days after Heidegger’s death in 1976 by Heidegger’s stipulation, Heidegger is famously evasive and misleading on the subject of his tenure as a Nazi official, seeking instead to paint it as a sadly misdirected application of his philosophical thought. Striking a quietist pose reminiscent of the late Hegel’s famed statement that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk,” Heidegger tells his interviewers:

    [P]hilosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

    Heidegger with Rudolf Augstein, one of the interviewers who conducted the 1966 Der Spiegel interview.

    In a strange irony, the decidedly anti-technological thought of the late Heidegger became a seminal influence on the intellectual ethos of Silicon Valley. The quietist project of preparing for the advent of a god that Heidegger espouses in his Spiegel interview becomes, in the hands of today’s tech overlords, an effort to “move fast and break things,” to “disrupt,” to force history open at its joints so that the god may enter. Tron: Ares is 2025’s cinematic depiction of the current state of this half-baked Silicon Valley messianism. If anything, the emptiness of the film may have ultimately done us all a favor: the digital messiah for which our tech overlords have prepared us is, like Jared Leto’s Ares, probably nothing but a vapid bore.

    [1] I, for one, sensed shades of the vaguely incestuous Raymond Shaw/Eleanor Iselin dynamic from the 1962 adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate in that relationship. The movie barely devotes any real interest to it, though, and in the process wastes Gillian Anderson’s talent.

  • The Spice Must Flow

    The Spice Must Flow

    Evry, Max. A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune. An Oral History (1984 Publishing, 2023).

    Any number of feature films have been released in theaters in versions so truncated that they are nearly incomprehensible. Two examples of this always leap to my mind: Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991), and David Lynch’s Dune (1984). In the case of Until the End of the World, at least, we now have the benefit of Wenders’ five-hour director’s cut, courtesy of the Criterion Collection. Having loved the 1991 theatrical release of Wenders’ epic road movie in the face of quite a lot of ridicule, and knowing its flaws, the director’s cut was, to me at least, a revelation of what could have been.

    No such director’s cut is forthcoming for Dune, even though a fan edit that restores a great deal of cut footage exists. Max Evry’s A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune. An Oral History (2023) gives us, among other things, a glimpse into why that director’s cut will likely never happen. Even if you don’t like the film enough to care about seeing a longer version of it, Masterpiece offers a glimpse at the way studio filmmaking worked in the early 1980’s, when Star Wars had already changed the rules of the game, for better or for worse, and the studios were racing to catch up. Films simply aren’t made like this anymore, and reading this book made me nostalgic for the version of Hollywood we get in the book, one where oddballs and hustlers could get a major studio to throw money at them to make a bizarre movie in the hope that it would stick. This book has no mention of focus groups, of creative decisions made with foreign distribution in mind, of crossover franchising—it’s just Lynch and Raffaella and Dino DeLaurentiis and a bunch of other weirdos in a literal sandbox in Mexico playing with millions of dollars.

    Lynch’s Dune was not the first attempt at adapting the 1965 Frank Herbert novel. Perhaps the best known was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ambitious but abortive 1970’s project, the subject of the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, though, the blockbuster success of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back had all of the studios searching for what might be the next epic sci-fi adventure franchise. Famed producer Dino DeLaurentiis decided that it could be Dune and its many sequels. After all, Star Wars had cribbed so much from Dune that Frank Herbert himself had even contemplated suing George Lucas. What DeLaurentiis and company had in mind was that Dune, adapted for the screen, could become a Star Wars for adults.

    The real weirdness of the making of Dune, when compared with 2024 Hollywood, begins with how David Lynch ended up directing it. At one point, Ridley Scott was attached to the project, but he decided to make Blade Runner instead (another sci-fi classic that, like Dune, suffered from studio interference). Lynch had developed a small but devoted art-house following in the industry from making Eraserhead and The Elephant Man—so devoted, in fact, that by 1981 and 1982 Lynch found himself in considerable demand from the major studios. He was on a short list to direct, if one can believe this, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (!), and George Lucas himself was courting him to direct Return of the Jedi, the third of the original Star Wars trilogy.

    But DeLaurentiis and Dune won out. Evry’s account, which is pieced together from interviews, reporting from the time, and other available sources, suggests but does not firmly conclude that Dune was, of all these major-studio courtships, the movie Lynch really wanted to make. It hints that Lynch really had little interest in Return of the Jedi, a film all of whose artistic decisions had already been made before production even began, but he strung Lucas along for a long time in order to use Lucasfilm’s interest in him as leverage over Universal, DeLaurentiis, and Dune. If so, the stratagem worked—at least as far as Lynch and his creative team getting the movie off the ground, which is more than previous attempts to adapt Dune had managed to do.

    The long story leading from pre-production to the release of the film, which comprises the bulk of the actual oral history in Masterpiece, is in effect the story of Lynch and his creative team running up against the limits of what a major studio was willing to do in 1983 and 1984. Universal and DeLaurentiis pumped a lot of money into Dune, and Lynch, as we now know with the benefit of his subsequent career, has a definite artistic vision, one which he brought to bear on Dune and which was blessed by Frank Herbert himself. The original hope, consistent with the Star Wars-like blockbuster franchise model, was that Dune would be the opening installment of a franchise that would eventually adapt Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. (As Masterpiece discusses, the studio even planned and marketed a series of tie-in action figures and toys, something I had completely forgotten.) As anyone who has read those sequels to Dune knows, though, that story isn’t the feel-good Joseph Campbell-style Journey of the Epic Savior Hero that Lucas baked into Star Wars. It is, in fact, a cautionary tale of the dangers posed by the (ahem, white) Epic Savior Hero narrative when wedded to advanced technology and geopolitical ambitions, a ciphered criticism of the colonial adventures of the European powers in the Middle East. A story for adults, definitely, and apparently the story Lynch was prepared to adapt for the screen.[1]

    The film, however, began to fall foul of the inevitable limitations of what a major movie studio hungry for smash hits would finance before principal photography even finished. Some of the problem was sheer cost, of course, a concern compounded by the fact that the Dune Lynch had in mind would have been at least three, possibly four, hours long. Add to that the fact that the film was being made before the advent of cheap, relatively easy CGI visual effects, and that the production had to switch visual effects companies right as the post-production VFX stage started, and the business side had a real problem on its hands. Masterpiece is careful not to draw firm conclusions or to point unambiguous fingers on this most sensitive point—it merely quotes the principals interviewed at length and lets the reader decide—but the picture that emerged for me is that both Universal and DeLaurentiis blinked in tandem early in post-production, albeit each for slightly different reasons, and forced Lynch to cut Dune into a much shorter, more traditional Epic Savior Hero film.

    The final product is now, after forty years, fairly well known—a perplexing two hour and seventeen-minute head-scratcher with awkward exposition and odd voice-over narration taking the place of several minutes’ worth of cut material, awkwardly paced, with the feel-good “rain on Arrakis” Kwisatz Haderach Messiah ending. (This was not originally how the film was supposed to end, and it certainly isn’t how the book ends.) Since the studio took control of the final cut before the visual effects production was done, there is famously not enough completed footage that could be used to reconstruct a director’s cut even if Lynch were interested in making one. (A 1988 version of the film—the “Alan Smithee” version, done without Lynch’s involvement—that restored cut material without finished visual effects that aired on independent TV stations in the US had to make do in some portions with still artistic drawings and lengthy voiceover narration.)

    Masterpiece abounds in anecdotes from numerous people who participated in making Dune—actors Kyle MacLachlan, Sean Young, and Alicia Witt and costume designer Bob Ringwood are especially memorable. But the main character of the book is obviously Lynch himself, who we encounter through the anecdotes of others in his first picture for a major Hollywood studio, losing creative control bit by bit. The experience was, by all reports, deeply traumatic for Lynch, and he famously says as little about it as possible in public (except that it taught him never to surrender the right of final cut). Predictably, then, Masterpiece does not include much from Lynch himself—the book’s coda, after over 500 pages, is a brief three-page discussion with Lynch that does not really offer much that he hasn’t said publicly before. This isn’t the fault of Evry’s book, though. It does a remarkable job of putting together interviews with a lot of people, most of the Dune team in fact who are still alive and willing and able to talk frankly about a forty-year-old film production. (Alas, there are no interviews with Patrick Stewart here, although I am told that Stewart’s recent memoir Making it So relates Stewart’s experiences acting in Dune.)

    If anything Masterpiece is, as a book, too comprehensive, too encyclopedic. The book seems to be aware of this fact—a foreword to the reader who isn’t interested in reading the whole thing gives advice on which parts she should read depending on her interest. I give kudos to the publisher for its willingness to produce a book of this size and production quality. (The copy I have is a hardcover with red foil page edges, a ribbon marker, and a forty-page photo insert, all of which is printed on heavy, high-quality paper.) In some cases, though, its ambit of trying to stuff all it can about Lynch’s Dune between two covers wears thin, especially in the last fourth of the book which discusses the film’s legacy. The chapter on subsequent cultural references to the film, for instance, reads like a more elaborate version of the “References in Popular Culture” section of a Wikipedia page. However, I can recommend this book, not only to fans of the film and of David Lynch, but also to anyone who is interested in the process and the challenges of adapting a literary work for the cinema. If that process fascinates and mystifies you as much as it does me, A Masterpiece in Disarray will give you a lot to think about.

    [1] As a critical aside, it took the Star Wars franchise forty years—that is, until Rian Johnson’s Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)—to make a tentative foray at grappling with the problems inherent in the Epic Savior Hero narrative, especially when it plays out in a diverse, technologically sophisticated world. In other words, the very element of Dune George Lucas didn’t steal. And what happened? The film critics seemed to like it, but “the fans” (and the “paid a lot of money to be consistently wrong” Ross Douthat) raised such a hue and cry that the next film basically pretended that none of The Last Jedi even happened. Not even Lucasfilm can make, or seriously wants to make, “Star Wars for adults.”