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I've seen Tron Legacy a couple of times now and the thing that bugs me the most, why does CLU want to leave the grid and enter the "real world"?

In the grid he has almost god like powers with ability to build the perfect world. But in the real world he would have no "real" super powers and have to do labour(slave labour even) to build the perfect world. I'm trying to comprehend why he would want to do it outside of the grid, surely he's just making things harder on himself.

Also the other thing is, the grid is infinite isn't it? If he were to try and build in planet earth, he'd hit limits such as, population to land limits?

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    I find it funny that clu was trying to get a huge grid warship through the arcades lab. Emagine a huge ship being digitized in the real world via IO portal in such a small lab room under the arcade. It would ether break out and destroy the arcade, be teliported outside of the arcade at a certain altatude, or endup lodged inside the arcades structure unable to move like a glitch in a videogame. Even if clu's army made it through, they would probability have a hard time fighting the military forces of the major countries around the real world like America china and Russia plus the entire Europea
    – user12295
    Feb 1, 2013 at 5:30
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    Who says Clu's warship wouldn't be a few inches long when it materializes in the real world? Actually it would be easier for Clu to achieve world dominance by remaining in the Grid but finding a way to infect the global Internet.
    – RobertF
    Oct 2, 2014 at 20:23

4 Answers 4

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CLU was created by Flynn to bring order to the Grid. This lead to the eventual coup and genocide of the ISOs (Quorra's "race" of programmes).

After many cycles bringing 'order' to the Grid, CLU simply felt that doing the same to the real world was the natural next step to his original directive from Flynn, especially as he saw the real world as a wildly chaotic place.

It's also inferred that the 'powers' of the programmes may be transferrable into the real world - although, we don't really get to see this by the end of the movie.

With regards to the infinity of the Grid - hard to say. There are possible resource limits (the Grid is not part of the global computer network in Legacy), and it is obvious that there is a limit to the extent of CLUs 'order' in the Grid as most of the programmes seem to reside in the one city.

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    +1 the Grid was not infinite. It was defined by the memory space of the server(s) on which it resided, as with any computer system.
    – BBlake
    Aug 26, 2011 at 14:46
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    Furthermore, entering the real world and perfecting it would be the ultimate rebuke to Flynn - it would be "setting God right". Aug 26, 2011 at 15:15
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    Note also that Clu's programming was to create "the perfect system". Flynn meant the Grid specifically, but he doesn't appear to have specified that in code. Oops. Any system that Clu perceives the existence of, he's going to try to perfect. People do what you meant... software does what you said.
    – Tynam
    Jan 8, 2012 at 8:36
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Survival. All it would take is one screwup where the arcade's electric bill wasn't paid and it is lights out for everyone on the grid. Clu was probably only dimly aware of the situation outside, but he had to know that he was at the mercy of whoever controlled the hardware he was running on.

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Well, with the electricity bill issue he was never going to run out of power since they (Alan and Sam or whoever cared about Kevin Flynn) would just pay it for whatever reason, and all the power was off that is when Sam turned it all on from the breaker box so it more than likely has a stand-alone power source coming from somewhere else. As far as the grid being infinite, that can't be possible since there are (like said before me) resource issues and you have to think about hard drive space since it's probably a slow machine from the mid to late 80's. He was told to build a perfect world and since our world isn't perfect he thought it was his duty to make it perfect, not knowing that perfection isn't possible

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Power. It's obvious from the setup within the system that Clu is all about gaining power. Like all dictators he wants to be the being in charge of everything. Which is why he is preparing an army to conquer the real world.

In terms of storytelling Clu is the evil overlord/big bad in the story and thus he has to be seen to be both evil (forcing people to fight in arenas and subverting their minds) and a credible threat to both the inner world and the outer world (vicious guards and huge army of 'zombies').

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