When Legacy came out, a lot of people argued that CLU was't a threat because there was no way he could ge his army out of the grid , and even if he could their weapons wouldn't work in the real world.

Thing is, even if CLU got his army into the real world , and his weapons worked there, and his generals soon followed him ( that is, tessler's army and the rest of CLU's forces ) I don't see how was he supposed to take over the world, let me explain.

Combat on the grid seems to be mostly hand to hand or with Identity Discs, and while vechicles with guns exist ( like the tanks or lightjets) Handguns appear to be very limited ( on screen we only see that Castor has one hidden in his cane in Legacy and that Pavel has sone kind of extreme Sniper rifle in Uprising) .

So while CLU and his forces may kill a bunch of civilians in their initial attack , once the military comes in they are dead, because while they may be Good at hand to hand combat, the military just needs to engage them at a safe distance with their guns.

Your thoughs?

Pilgrim1099 Wrote:That's one of the biggest weaknesses in the script that it fails to explain CLU's reasoning to get out of the Grid. If CLU thinks he can take on the real world with his miitary, he'd get wiped out in FIVE minutes. The US military would send in drones, jets, crack marines and take them out. Most likely capture one program for interrogation and twist this technology for their own. ... This might be one of the personal reasons why Flynn wants to prevent CLU from doing just that and knowing the world is'nt ready to see programs running about, or should we say, artificial intelligence?

Actually, now that you mention it, it may make sense that part of the reason Flynn doesn't want Clu to get out is that, well, he doesn't want the secret to get out. For probably many reasons.

Even if Clu et al get taken out in pretty short order by the military, there will still be a HUGE to-do in which people will probably die, there will be a lot of attention, etc.

And at that time, yeah, there will probably be some serious 'splainin to do, Lucy. And bam, the cat is out of the bag. And NOT in the tidy way Flynn probably imagined, (which would be that he'd have all the kinks worked out and understand the Grid and its capabilities/possibilities/limitations completely, so he could present a "finished product," as it were). Yeah, I don't think the world's ready, either. For any of that. Not for Clu's ruckus, not for programs among us, and not to go in there and practice our selfish, entitlement-minded manifest destiny to take over yet another world (as humanity has continually done throughout history and doesn't show any signs of ceasing any time soon).

Really, who knows if Flynn may not have changed his mind about the whole Grid thing. I think I have a partially-finished fic in which, in all that time he's been there, he has realized that mixing human + program worlds is not such a hot idea. I don't recall any point in T:L in which he expresses a desire to bring the two together in present-tense terms as if he still believes it could work.

Kat Wrote:We never do learn what his plans may actually have been. But I was looking over the screencaps of the scenes on the ship, and the dude's definitely not taking over the world with a few recos (do those even have weapons systems??), a few jets, some light runners. Just no. I'm not even sure I saw any tanks packed on board that thing (though there must have been). Imagine reco meets fighter jet. Imagine one-man lightjet meets civilian with a high-powered rifle. Forget it, man. Here's a screenshot that gives you an idea of what he's packing along: http://www.homeofthenutty.com/movies/screencaps/displayimage.php?album=140&pid=153304#top_display_media

Those are tanks on the left side of the picture. Kinda blurry, but yeah those are tanks.

Humans would totally beat Clu's army. But then why did Kevin say how it would be "game over" if Clu got out? How would Flynn think Clu would win unless he maybe could somehow?

Also maybe Clu thinks the outside world is like in the Jules Verne books, which would be easy to beat.

Here's a thought: So say that CLU pulls his army through. With the Rectifier. Imagine, what he could do, if it was found that the rectifier worked on humans. Now, all he has to do is capture people (easy enough with his army), rectify them to his vision of a perfect system, and send em out again to get more. Perhaps THAT was his goal. And we have no idea whether vehicles can move through the portal. We can only assume that they could, if aided by Flynn's Disc. And we have no reason to assume that a realized rectifier wouldn't work on humans.

Another "Game Over" possibility.

As yes, Rectiifier as another Star Wars reference. = Star Destroyer. Different shape, yeah, but the "moving slowly through space so we can see how massive it is and feel intimidated" -- yup.

Okay, tangent over. Anyway, the problem with shooting that thing down is that it IS massive. It would cause A LOT of damage if it fell. No way would they use nukes. They might try to shoot it down over the ocean, or POSSIBLY a large desert. But over an even-remotely populated area? Never.

I do imagine a regular missile could take it out, though. You don't need to explode the whole thing-- just damage enough to disable it and bring it down.

KingJ.exe Wrote: And wasn't it another ship that flattened Arjia? The one that you blow up in the end of Evolution?

The Regulator was the ship that destroyed Arija in Evolution , The Rectifier is a more advanced version of that ship , so we can asume at least it has the same weapons that it had In Evolution.

I think the militay would choose to destroy the rectifier after it destroyed or conquered a few cities , after all if all that is down are dead people then it would make sense to destroy the thing before it kills more people

Alsi , if the military somehow destroyed the Rectifier, seeing how it's weapons work,would the ship it turn into pixels or turn into a bunch of scrap metal?

In the film, I think Flynn said something to the effect that Clu "has found a way to take this with him". Indicating Clu's ship, or his resources, or his army.

It's true that everything is written a bit too vaguely in the script, even though it sure seems some specific plot on Clu's part is implied. And don't forget: Clu actually showed his minions a holographic projection of the Earth - the User world, with its correct geographical layout. Clearly, Clu has access to something. He knows something. As for whether he has all of Flynn's memories - recall that Clu easily impersonated Flynn's speech patterns and real life mannerisms (at least Flynn as a younger man, the age that Clu had been copied from) to trick Sam during the initial meeting. Personally, I think it's unlikely that Clu would have been able to drop into "Flynn personality" like flipping a switch unless he had a full copy of Kevin Flynn's mind and at least some memories. Just hearing Flynn say "Yeah man" a few times on the Grid wouldn't have done the trick.

Something I always considered is that Clu and his engineers have had a thousand years to sit there in the Grid and prepare for Clu's future. Again, too bad the script isn't specific... but I wonder if Clu had not had his engineers design versions of their equipment that would function according to the physics data Flynn had on the real world, that was used to create the detailed simulation of the Grid in the first place.

One thought that would possibly make Clu's military genuinely scary in real life: if a RL translation of their technology was predicated on nanotech. In the Grid, all matter is smart matter. Everything is purposefully constructed, at the simulated-atomic level. All substances in the Grid are synthetics, some of which have similar appearances and textures to say, steel, stone, or glass. But that's just texturing. A direct translation of the Grid's operation in the real world might be smart matter comprised of nanomachines. That could prove to be a serious threat if it went too far before it was stopped. Clu might have been able to break down anything (and anyone) in his way to create fresh hardware and repair damage. Combined with the technology of the digitizing beam, and there could be some plausible doomsday scenarios to be found.

Of course, it's also possible that the truth lay somewhere in the middle. Clu may have had a basic understanding of the User world, but only as a rough sketch rather than complete ignorance. He's as smart and ambitious as Kevin Flynn age 35. He'd be one to take the chance and roll with it, adapt as he went. He probably wouldn't have gotten overly far. But he could done a huge amount of damage and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Thus "game over".

Plus, if we're to give credit to Clu's intelligence, here's an alternative plot: Clu may have needed Flynn's disc to exit the Grid. And he obviously plugged it into the Rectifier in order to upload or modify the code of the ship and its contents. (HUGE hint right there, that he had indeed engineered a way to manifest that stuff in the real world. It was being modified so it would actually work and not fall apart.) But nobody says he was going to stupidly sail the ship through first. What if Clu exited the Grid while his forces guarded the portal. Then he impersonates Flynn. Takes control of Flynn's resources. And prepares for a proper attack, bringing his forces through en-mass in the right time and place. Don't have them pop out of an arcade basement. Transfer the Grid, take Shiva or a bigger digitizer to the desert. And manifest a whole fleet of warships instantly, before anyone can possibly respond. Send them out to every major city in North America, start the takeover.

Tzigone Wrote:And he would be able to open the portal and go back for more people/equipment

He wouldn't even need to go back. All he'd need is a few keystrokes and he'd have a thousand more war machines lined up to come out through the portal.