9 ms·

Tron changed cinema, predicted the future of tech

186 points by ColinWright 4y ago

darig 4y ago
atdrummond 4y ago
dr_dshiv 4y ago
“Tron is so idealistic: ‘If we just get the tools into the hands of people, then democracy is assured for all time,’” he says. “The irony is that the computer has been used to just damn-near overthrow democracy! If someone had said: ‘If we put these tools into the hands of the public, it’s going to result in endless conspiracy theories, misinformation, lack of civility, endless rivers of porn, and the most violent video games you could ever imagine,’ we would have said: ‘Oh, no way. It’s going to be wonderful!’ It turns out we can predict the tools of the future but we can’t really predict the philosophies or the ethics of the future.” I could cry.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  Another poor jab from the guardian. Newspapers, television, even orators in the public foro have long allowed the wealthy to manipulate democracy. Democracy has never been a perfect tool because people are gullible and fallible. But it's more convenient for politicians to decry the sins of their enemies than to admit their powers should be largely reduced or stripped away entirely. Criticising a tool because it allow your enemies to speak is peak society polarisation; not long left before our empire will come down crumbling
  - toyg 4y ago
    It is true, however, that the internet has normalized pornography. Most other effects are just Guthenberg-like ("people reading and writing their own bibles?!? Madness! And the result is all these new wars!"), par for the course.
- ls15 4y ago
  > It turns out we can predict the tools of the future but we can’t really predict the philosophies or the ethics of the future.” Haven't you seen Idiocracy?
  - hanniabu 4y ago
    Idiocracy is basically the new 1984
prawn 4y ago
Slightly related, but I quite like Tron Legacy (plus its styling and soundtrack). It's tame enough that you can watch with your kids. I've watched it with my young son, along with Interstellar and Inception, as things that encourage creatively think outside what we understand to be possible - even if just to have him thinking about story/game/play angles. Digital or dream worlds, time dilating/bending, etc.
- Fnoord 4y ago
  I really like your attitude, but I have trouble with regards to scary scenes / events (also cause I know some scenes/movies/series made a lot of impact on me as kid like the werewolves from Ghostbusters). I remember the original Tron as more peaceful / less violent. Interstellar didn't contain violence IIRC, but Inception does. The woman goes batshit crazy. I'd also like to add Moon and The Matrix. But again, be careful with suspense and children. Moon's ending was a bit lurid. As for the point being, the movie is from 1982 and was on about a battle between sysadmin/ML/AI and users, its also a homage to a community which did not exist back then in the same effect it does now (the FOSS community).
  - prawn 4y ago
    I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't impact him; he reacts quite clearly if something is problematic (he's read/watched LOTR/Hobbit and one moment he reacted to in The Hobbit movies was Bolg vs Kili). Mal in Inception was probably the heaviest thing as the gunplay there isn't overly visceral. We've watched The Matrix together, Ready Player One (undead ballroom was fine, but skipped the old zombie in the bathroom) and Ender's Game (has a graphic bullying revenge scene). I love Moon, but the language is a bit old for him for now - one day though, as I think that's one of the tightest sci-fi stories, and will get him thinking. Blade Runner too. He'd probably cope with recent Dune, which I thought was very polished. We should watch The Martian, as he read Project Hail Mary and liked it. From memory, Arrival would be good assuming some of the undertones went over his head. Contact is another good one in a similar vein (common element with Project Hail Mary and Arrival of decoding messages).
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
Too bad they never made a sequel to Tron: Legacy
- ekianjo 4y ago
  it was bad enough not to justify one. Even the CG was horrible.
  - vaylian 4y ago
    Funny. I think it is a really good movie. I like watching it again sometimes. But tastes are different I guess. I also put on the soundtrack on a regular basis.
    - jdshaffer 4y ago
      Completely agree. I really enjoyed it -- graphics, overall concept, and love the soundtrack. Of course it has its quirks and plot holes, but I enjoy it nonetheless. :)
      - smcin 4y ago
        Tron: Legacy didn't have a plot. The soundtrack was excellent, the CGI was alright. It was a very tame for-the-money sequel with no point of view about anything at all.
  - objclxt 4y ago
    > it was bad enough not to justify one. Hollywood doesn't greenlight sequels based on how good or bad a film actually is. It's all about the numbers. The budget for Tron Legacy was $170 million, and it made $400 million at the box office. That sounds quite good - it doubled its money! - except film budgets don't include marketing costs, which for a blockbuster can be as much as the budget itself. I doubt that Tron Legacy broke even. If a blockbuster isn't making at least three times its budget it's going to be seen as something of a disappointment at the studio.
satisfice 4y ago
Tron was not a visionary movie. It was a dumb movie. I watched it in theaters when it came out. It didn’t make sense on any level. It’s not consistent with anything computers do or what information means to a computer. It is a movie made by ignorant people who mapped a standard plot to a fictional concept of computing which resulted in nonsense. It was painful to watch.
- goto11 4y ago
  It is not a movie about computers. The article explains it straightforwardly: It is a shaman traveling to the spirit world. It is a psychedelic adventure, using fictionalized computers and computer graphics as scenery. It was pretty groundbreaking in depicting a computer-generated magical world instead of the computer just being a voice coming out of a box.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    I mean fair enough, fans are free to romanticize it all they want and that's fine and normal. But let's just recognize that what you said is an interpretation and not an objective fact.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dahart 4y ago
      What do you mean? It was the director quoted in the article talking about the shaman’s spirit journey. Are you saying the director’s stated intention is somehow not factual?
      - pdimitar 4y ago
        I am definitely not saying that and I wasn't aware this is what the director said. Thanks for the correction. Even with that however, I think we can all agree that art interpretation is a personal experience and nobody else can impose their interpretation on us. F.ex. Michael Bay claimed that his Transformers movies are an emotional journey while an overwhelming amount of movie-goers said they went there for the robots and explosions. I respect the director's idea but it's absolutely not how I experienced the movie.
thinkingemote 4y ago
Bad CGI is often just bad cinematography. The ability to have a camera anywhere goes to some animators and studios heads, and so the viewer sees something different than normal framed shots. Avatar was really bad for this. The first Tron film had good cinematography.
- cal85 4y ago
  There’s a newish David Attenborough–narrated CGI nature documentary about dinosaurs, and I think it suffers from something like this. The photorealism is top notch but it still looks fake. At first I thought it was that the dinosaurs’ movement felt off, but I now think it’s more that the the cinematography doesn’t feel enough like a nature doc. It feels more like a cinematic feature, where everything about the framing and mise en scene is intentional and beautiful, too much so. Bits of blurred foliage in front of the subject feel like a DOP’s intentional ‘dirty frame’ rather than something that accidentally got in the way of the (imaginary) camera operator while they tried to get their shot of a fleeting animal moment. It’s all just too nice and considered. Or maybe it’s just that I know it’s fake because it’s dinosaurs, making this an unsolvable problem, I’m not sure.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    I see every movie in the same light. I know it's just a bunch of actors and directors and gaffers stitching together various shots and scenes, so occasionally it is a real treat to watch something and forget all that.
saos 4y ago
I even think the 2010 version was a real work of art. Never really apppreciated it until recently
- snarfy 4y ago
  The original flopped at the theaters. It took a long time for the it to be really appreciated.
tronster 4y ago
Loved the movie as a kid; it changed my life (even though it took me a few times of watching it to fully understand what was happening.) The sequel, "Tron Legacy", was a fun action movie, with a great sound-track but it's computer world felt "smaller" than the 1982 original and it didn't deliver on the deeper themes. I would still watch either one today and am hoping for a third. Until then, there's always riding light cycles at Disney World: https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2022/07/celebrate-the-40th-anniversary-of-tron-with-a-new-look-at-tron-lightcycle-run-in-magic-kingdom-park/ https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2022/07/celebrate-the...
- laumars 4y ago
  You should check out the cartoon: Tron Uprising. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1812523/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1812523/
jgrahamc 4y ago
The article mentions that Westworld (1973) used computer graphics. I did a short YouTube video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ
beloch 4y ago
Anthropomorphize computer programs and invent a BS way of injecting a real human into a computer and Tron is what you get. It's complete nonsense! However, if you can suspend disbelief, Tron is a seminal film that has echoed through all of cinema for decades and is a helluva lot of fun to boot. It is the 80's in a single film. It oozes style and is a groundbreaking technical tour de force that must not be missed by any serious fan of movies. The sequel is an epic Daft Punk music video that far surpasses "Interstella 5555" and, for that reason alone, is required viewing unless you absolutely hate Daft Punk. There's a cartoon series, Tron: Uprising, that is excellent even though it was cancelled after one season. (It stars Elijah Wood, in case you needed another reason to check it out...) Tron may not be the most commercially successful movie franchise of all time, but each instalment of it has been a truly novel treat. It's may be style without much substance, but what style! I eagerly await my next dose!
- laumars 4y ago
  The cartoon series is arguably the strongest instalment in the franchise. It's got the strongest story line and the most depth to it. It's a great loss Disney cancelled it
- nazka 4y ago
  > Anthropomorphize computer programs and invent a BS way of injecting a real human into a computer and Tron is what you get. It's complete nonsense! It’s true but some tech innovations now do stuff we thought dumb and/or impossible like in Blade Runner and the “enhanced” tech meme. Fast track to today, it’s not the full thing but we thought that even being able to “enhance” a picture even once was stupid. Now you have ML model doing just that and some companies selling this tools to photographs and stuff. It’s crazy
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Although, due to the way ML does that image enhancing it wouldn't actually work for any of the things it's used for in the show (since we still can't create information out of nothing).
Brendinooo 4y ago
Being a huge fan of the 2010 sequel, I finally watched the original a couple of years ago. If you’re not affected by nostalgia or if you weren’t there when it changed the game, it’s not the greatest movie. It’s pretty weird though…the good kind of weird, I think. And it was interesting to see how it immortalized a very early 80s sense of computing: everything is a “program” that does a single, limited thing.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I think most "kids films" trip when they fall back to having to have a villain (hisssss!) to drive the plot. Faceless Corporation would have been slightly less tropey but perhaps a little too, ahem, meta for the kids to understand?
- gfxgirl 4y ago
  Being a huge fan of the origianl I hated the sequel. Everything that made the original unique is tossed asside for bland and boring in the sequel. As a simple example, light cycles that turn 90 degrees are interesting because they don't exist in the real world. light cycles that turn the same as motorcycles are less interesting beacuse we already have motorcycles in the real world. There's lots of that in the sequel where some artist didn't get that the limitations of the original add to its appeal.
  - Brendinooo 4y ago
    Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing. But I thought The Grid was anything but bland and boring. It was beautiful and unique! The End of Line entrance and subsequent fight is iconic; I love when “God” enters the fray. And speaking of limitations adding to appeal, the uncanny valley de-aging of Jeff Bridges works (opening scene aside) because CLU himself is not quite right. I could go on. The director went on to do Oblivion and the new Top Gun; both were really well-crafted.
pdimitar 4y ago
Watched "Tron: Legacy" several years ago and it all seemed like a new and fresh coat of paint put on the excuse to put young people in skintight suits and have them fight nonsensical battles so we can gasp at how athletic they are. There were parts and scenery I did like but they weren't many. It felt very rushed. I know how nostalgia works and I'm not demeaning the good memories many people have of the original. At the same time, it should be recognized that if you don't have a nostalgia for this franchise then it's pretty meh. Same with Blade Runner.
- pitaj 4y ago
  Tron: Legacy has its flaws. Blade Runner: 2049 is critically acclaimed and one of the greatest movies I've ever seen. It's beautifully shot and wondrously cinematic, with incredible visual effects. Better than the original.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    I don't get this need to try and paint a subjective experience into an objective fact. "Interstellar" was loved by many yet me and my wife and like half the cinema (we were about 40 people in the theater at the time) couldn't stop cringing and gasping "oh come on!" for most of the movie. Same with "Blade Runner: 2049" btw. There were also a good number of people who left midway, too. You like "Tron" -- no judgement from me. Good for you, glad you liked it, that's why we should watch movies: to get some positive emotion and/or education out of them, right? But it does come across as pretentious to try and make an art perception into an objective process. It really is not. It's a personal emotional experience. To give you the reverse example, I absolutely loved the "Avatar" (with the blue aliens), yet I know of several internet communities that will never tire at spitting at it. I am fine with it and I never took offense or tried to paint the movie better when I was there. I don't need validation from other people to like what I like.
    - pitaj 4y ago
      You gave your review, and I gave mine. We just have different taste. I wasn't saying you have to like it, but you ended your comment with a statement: "[without nostalgia] it's pretty meh. Same with Blade Runner." that I disagree with. We're allowed to disagree; as you said, it's subjective. Movies like Blade Runner sometimes don't appeal to mainstream audiences. Both BR movies have slow pacing, and often have long shots without dialog. Interstellar is similar in many ways. Avatar is a good movie. Sure, the plot is simple, but it's a groundbreaking film nonetheless. And still quite enjoyable.
moomin 4y ago
A fun thing about those 80s wire-frame graphics: many of them weren’t CGI at all. The desire for the “computer 3D” look was such that quite a few film-makers faked it up using actual 3D models painted to look like wireframe.
- dazzawazza 4y ago
  The CG from Escape From New York was done in a similar way. https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/12/escape-from-new-york-at-40-how-those-cg-glider-graphics-were-actually-achieved-with-physical-models/ https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/12/escape-from-new-york...
- tootie 4y ago
  A lot of visuals were just hand-animated. Especially the fluorescent highlights over the human actors. Just drawn on top of the film. Only a handful of sequences were fully digital, but it was still mind-blowing for 1982.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> The film was even disqualified from the best special effects Oscar, since using computers was considered “cheating”. Hilarious — analogism raises its ugly head.
- corrral 4y ago
  I get what they mean, though. Computers have made every "making of" for FX-heavy movies super boring, except the few that still have some notable practical work, too.
  - falcor84 4y ago
    It's not exactly a "making of", but I found this explanation of the evolution of hair in Disney/Pixar features to be extremely interesting: How Disney's Animated Hair Became So Realistic, From 'Tangled' To 'Encanto' | Movies Insider https://youtu.be/cvTchBdrqdw https://youtu.be/cvTchBdrqdw
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
weldedtogether 4y ago
Tron is probably my favorite movie of all time! A fun adventure movie that's amazing to look at through the entire movie thanks to the immense effort put forth by the entire team, even if the story goofs up in a few places. If you have the time, watch The Making of Tron documentary where they go over (and show) some of the processes they used and show them as well! One thing I can't get over in regards to the sequel (Legacy) is how it changed the aesthetic of the computer world from nice bright neon on white and vivid purples to all black and neon blue or orange! Legacy is jam packed with CGI but it's still less visually interesting to look at (in my opinion) because of the lack of color. Not to mention it moves away from the "power to the users/believers" angle of the first film to try and take a philosophical stand on everything that amounts to meaning nothing. Tron is a truly unique movie in everything it did, and my greatest sadness is that nothing that came after it has the same look and feel as the original. The closest we get is the world they had in Kingdom Hearts 2...
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  One of the movies I don’t mind getting a sequel. One of my favorite movies too.
  - weldedtogether 4y ago
    Yeah it clearly struck a chord with a lot of people. I just wish we could have gotten something more of the original aesthetic... seems Legacy has sort of overwritten Tron in a lot of minds of both people and producers. At least the original isn't going anywhere!
epx 4y ago
I’d bet many people here tried to implement Light Cycles AI as one of their first programs
- ColinWright 4y ago
  Well, given that Tron came out in 1982 and I got my first computer in 1979 ... not me. My first programs were sorting algorithms, then I got tired of how slow the machine was, taught myself Z80 machine code (not assembler, machine code) from a book, figured how to smash the stack, created a machine code monitor, and wrote a compiler to translate up my BASIC programs to Z80.
  - jecel 4y ago
    In 1979 my high school friends and I used to play a game on paper that was essentially "light cycles". We used a sheet of graph paper and took turns extending our previous walls (each drawn with a different color using a fancy four color pen) by one more square. None of us has access to computers back then, though our science fair project that year was a microprocessor based video game (using the Signetics 2650). We ran out of time to implement our own games, but "cycles" would have been our second right after "pong". I did not think of having a character at the leading edge of the wall until I watched "Tron", however. And then I did implement it like that on my TI99/4A including the movie's theme music. While I couldn't find the name of the paper version of the game we played, it seems that there was already a two player arcade version in 1976 called "Blockade" by Gremlin.
1MachineElf 4y ago
I was thinking of Tron just a couple hours ago, indirectly, because of public reaction to a video of a recent DJ set. The DJ (named Blessed Madonna, formerly Black Madonna) played Thomas Bengalter's 1995 Ventura. The video was had a lot of clips mixed in reacting negatively to the song and the DJ's skills on her mixing deck. Most of the comments were very disparaging. Knowing who Thomas Bengalter is, a co-founder of Daft Punk, it was bind blowing how people could react so negatively to the same sound behind the acclaimed Tron soundtrack.
racl101 4y ago
I just really liked Wendy Carlos' soundtrack. Still listen to it. It has such a calming presence. Say what you will about Daft Punk and Tron Legacy but the original Tron OST is underrated.
excalibur 4y ago
> Tron was also the first attempt to visualise the digital realm itself – what was then called “cyberspace” but might now be termed “the metaverse”. Every time you use that word, Zuckerberg kills a puppy.

186 points by ColinWright 4y ago

“Tron is so idealistic: ‘If we just get the tools into the hands of people, then democracy is assured for all time,’” he says. “The irony is that the computer has been used to just damn-near overthrow democracy! If someone had said: ‘If we put these tools into the hands of the public, it’s going to result in endless conspiracy theories, misinformation, lack of civility, endless rivers of porn, and the most violent video games you could ever imagine,’ we would have said: ‘Oh, no way. It’s going to be wonderful!’ It turns out we can predict the tools of the future but we can’t really predict the philosophies or the ethics of the future.” I could cry.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jokethrowaway 4y ago
Another poor jab from the guardian. Newspapers, television, even orators in the public foro have long allowed the wealthy to manipulate democracy. Democracy has never been a perfect tool because people are gullible and fallible. But it's more convenient for politicians to decry the sins of their enemies than to admit their powers should be largely reduced or stripped away entirely. Criticising a tool because it allow your enemies to speak is peak society polarisation; not long left before our empire will come down crumbling
- toyg 4y ago
  It is true, however, that the internet has normalized pornography. Most other effects are just Guthenberg-like ("people reading and writing their own bibles?!? Madness! And the result is all these new wars!"), par for the course.
ls15 4y ago
> It turns out we can predict the tools of the future but we can’t really predict the philosophies or the ethics of the future.” Haven't you seen Idiocracy?
- hanniabu 4y ago
  Idiocracy is basically the new 1984

prawn 4y ago

Slightly related, but I quite like Tron Legacy (plus its styling and soundtrack). It's tame enough that you can watch with your kids. I've watched it with my young son, along with Interstellar and Inception, as things that encourage creatively think outside what we understand to be possible - even if just to have him thinking about story/game/play angles. Digital or dream worlds, time dilating/bending, etc.

Fnoord 4y ago
I really like your attitude, but I have trouble with regards to scary scenes / events (also cause I know some scenes/movies/series made a lot of impact on me as kid like the werewolves from Ghostbusters). I remember the original Tron as more peaceful / less violent. Interstellar didn't contain violence IIRC, but Inception does. The woman goes batshit crazy. I'd also like to add Moon and The Matrix. But again, be careful with suspense and children. Moon's ending was a bit lurid. As for the point being, the movie is from 1982 and was on about a battle between sysadmin/ML/AI and users, its also a homage to a community which did not exist back then in the same effect it does now (the FOSS community).
- prawn 4y ago
  I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't impact him; he reacts quite clearly if something is problematic (he's read/watched LOTR/Hobbit and one moment he reacted to in The Hobbit movies was Bolg vs Kili). Mal in Inception was probably the heaviest thing as the gunplay there isn't overly visceral. We've watched The Matrix together, Ready Player One (undead ballroom was fine, but skipped the old zombie in the bathroom) and Ender's Game (has a graphic bullying revenge scene). I love Moon, but the language is a bit old for him for now - one day though, as I think that's one of the tightest sci-fi stories, and will get him thinking. Blade Runner too. He'd probably cope with recent Dune, which I thought was very polished. We should watch The Martian, as he read Project Hail Mary and liked it. From memory, Arrival would be good assuming some of the undertones went over his head. Contact is another good one in a similar vein (common element with Project Hail Mary and Arrival of decoding messages).

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

Too bad they never made a sequel to Tron: Legacy

ekianjo 4y ago
it was bad enough not to justify one. Even the CG was horrible.
- vaylian 4y ago
  Funny. I think it is a really good movie. I like watching it again sometimes. But tastes are different I guess. I also put on the soundtrack on a regular basis.
  - jdshaffer 4y ago
    Completely agree. I really enjoyed it -- graphics, overall concept, and love the soundtrack. Of course it has its quirks and plot holes, but I enjoy it nonetheless. :)
    - smcin 4y ago
      Tron: Legacy didn't have a plot. The soundtrack was excellent, the CGI was alright. It was a very tame for-the-money sequel with no point of view about anything at all.
- objclxt 4y ago
  > it was bad enough not to justify one. Hollywood doesn't greenlight sequels based on how good or bad a film actually is. It's all about the numbers. The budget for Tron Legacy was $170 million, and it made $400 million at the box office. That sounds quite good - it doubled its money! - except film budgets don't include marketing costs, which for a blockbuster can be as much as the budget itself. I doubt that Tron Legacy broke even. If a blockbuster isn't making at least three times its budget it's going to be seen as something of a disappointment at the studio.

satisfice 4y ago

Tron was not a visionary movie. It was a dumb movie. I watched it in theaters when it came out. It didn’t make sense on any level. It’s not consistent with anything computers do or what information means to a computer. It is a movie made by ignorant people who mapped a standard plot to a fictional concept of computing which resulted in nonsense. It was painful to watch.

goto11 4y ago
It is not a movie about computers. The article explains it straightforwardly: It is a shaman traveling to the spirit world. It is a psychedelic adventure, using fictionalized computers and computer graphics as scenery. It was pretty groundbreaking in depicting a computer-generated magical world instead of the computer just being a voice coming out of a box.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  I mean fair enough, fans are free to romanticize it all they want and that's fine and normal. But let's just recognize that what you said is an interpretation and not an objective fact.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dahart 4y ago
    What do you mean? It was the director quoted in the article talking about the shaman’s spirit journey. Are you saying the director’s stated intention is somehow not factual?
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      I am definitely not saying that and I wasn't aware this is what the director said. Thanks for the correction. Even with that however, I think we can all agree that art interpretation is a personal experience and nobody else can impose their interpretation on us. F.ex. Michael Bay claimed that his Transformers movies are an emotional journey while an overwhelming amount of movie-goers said they went there for the robots and explosions. I respect the director's idea but it's absolutely not how I experienced the movie.

thinkingemote 4y ago

Bad CGI is often just bad cinematography. The ability to have a camera anywhere goes to some animators and studios heads, and so the viewer sees something different than normal framed shots. Avatar was really bad for this. The first Tron film had good cinematography.

cal85 4y ago
There’s a newish David Attenborough–narrated CGI nature documentary about dinosaurs, and I think it suffers from something like this. The photorealism is top notch but it still looks fake. At first I thought it was that the dinosaurs’ movement felt off, but I now think it’s more that the the cinematography doesn’t feel enough like a nature doc. It feels more like a cinematic feature, where everything about the framing and mise en scene is intentional and beautiful, too much so. Bits of blurred foliage in front of the subject feel like a DOP’s intentional ‘dirty frame’ rather than something that accidentally got in the way of the (imaginary) camera operator while they tried to get their shot of a fleeting animal moment. It’s all just too nice and considered. Or maybe it’s just that I know it’s fake because it’s dinosaurs, making this an unsolvable problem, I’m not sure.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  I see every movie in the same light. I know it's just a bunch of actors and directors and gaffers stitching together various shots and scenes, so occasionally it is a real treat to watch something and forget all that.

saos 4y ago

I even think the 2010 version was a real work of art. Never really apppreciated it until recently

snarfy 4y ago
The original flopped at the theaters. It took a long time for the it to be really appreciated.

tronster 4y ago

Loved the movie as a kid; it changed my life (even though it took me a few times of watching it to fully understand what was happening.) The sequel, "Tron Legacy", was a fun action movie, with a great sound-track but it's computer world felt "smaller" than the 1982 original and it didn't deliver on the deeper themes. I would still watch either one today and am hoping for a third. Until then, there's always riding light cycles at Disney World: https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2022/07/celebrate-the-40th-anniversary-of-tron-with-a-new-look-at-tron-lightcycle-run-in-magic-kingdom-park/ https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2022/07/celebrate-the...

laumars 4y ago
You should check out the cartoon: Tron Uprising. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1812523/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1812523/

jgrahamc 4y ago

The article mentions that Westworld (1973) used computer graphics. I did a short YouTube video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ

beloch 4y ago

Anthropomorphize computer programs and invent a BS way of injecting a real human into a computer and Tron is what you get. It's complete nonsense! However, if you can suspend disbelief, Tron is a seminal film that has echoed through all of cinema for decades and is a helluva lot of fun to boot. It is the 80's in a single film. It oozes style and is a groundbreaking technical tour de force that must not be missed by any serious fan of movies. The sequel is an epic Daft Punk music video that far surpasses "Interstella 5555" and, for that reason alone, is required viewing unless you absolutely hate Daft Punk. There's a cartoon series, Tron: Uprising, that is excellent even though it was cancelled after one season. (It stars Elijah Wood, in case you needed another reason to check it out...) Tron may not be the most commercially successful movie franchise of all time, but each instalment of it has been a truly novel treat. It's may be style without much substance, but what style! I eagerly await my next dose!

laumars 4y ago
The cartoon series is arguably the strongest instalment in the franchise. It's got the strongest story line and the most depth to it. It's a great loss Disney cancelled it
nazka 4y ago
> Anthropomorphize computer programs and invent a BS way of injecting a real human into a computer and Tron is what you get. It's complete nonsense! It’s true but some tech innovations now do stuff we thought dumb and/or impossible like in Blade Runner and the “enhanced” tech meme. Fast track to today, it’s not the full thing but we thought that even being able to “enhance” a picture even once was stupid. Now you have ML model doing just that and some companies selling this tools to photographs and stuff. It’s crazy
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Although, due to the way ML does that image enhancing it wouldn't actually work for any of the things it's used for in the show (since we still can't create information out of nothing).

Brendinooo 4y ago

Being a huge fan of the 2010 sequel, I finally watched the original a couple of years ago. If you’re not affected by nostalgia or if you weren’t there when it changed the game, it’s not the greatest movie. It’s pretty weird though…the good kind of weird, I think. And it was interesting to see how it immortalized a very early 80s sense of computing: everything is a “program” that does a single, limited thing.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
I think most "kids films" trip when they fall back to having to have a villain (hisssss!) to drive the plot. Faceless Corporation would have been slightly less tropey but perhaps a little too, ahem, meta for the kids to understand?
gfxgirl 4y ago
Being a huge fan of the origianl I hated the sequel. Everything that made the original unique is tossed asside for bland and boring in the sequel. As a simple example, light cycles that turn 90 degrees are interesting because they don't exist in the real world. light cycles that turn the same as motorcycles are less interesting beacuse we already have motorcycles in the real world. There's lots of that in the sequel where some artist didn't get that the limitations of the original add to its appeal.
- Brendinooo 4y ago
  Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing. But I thought The Grid was anything but bland and boring. It was beautiful and unique! The End of Line entrance and subsequent fight is iconic; I love when “God” enters the fray. And speaking of limitations adding to appeal, the uncanny valley de-aging of Jeff Bridges works (opening scene aside) because CLU himself is not quite right. I could go on. The director went on to do Oblivion and the new Top Gun; both were really well-crafted.

pdimitar 4y ago

Watched "Tron: Legacy" several years ago and it all seemed like a new and fresh coat of paint put on the excuse to put young people in skintight suits and have them fight nonsensical battles so we can gasp at how athletic they are. There were parts and scenery I did like but they weren't many. It felt very rushed. I know how nostalgia works and I'm not demeaning the good memories many people have of the original. At the same time, it should be recognized that if you don't have a nostalgia for this franchise then it's pretty meh. Same with Blade Runner.

pitaj 4y ago
Tron: Legacy has its flaws. Blade Runner: 2049 is critically acclaimed and one of the greatest movies I've ever seen. It's beautifully shot and wondrously cinematic, with incredible visual effects. Better than the original.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  I don't get this need to try and paint a subjective experience into an objective fact. "Interstellar" was loved by many yet me and my wife and like half the cinema (we were about 40 people in the theater at the time) couldn't stop cringing and gasping "oh come on!" for most of the movie. Same with "Blade Runner: 2049" btw. There were also a good number of people who left midway, too. You like "Tron" -- no judgement from me. Good for you, glad you liked it, that's why we should watch movies: to get some positive emotion and/or education out of them, right? But it does come across as pretentious to try and make an art perception into an objective process. It really is not. It's a personal emotional experience. To give you the reverse example, I absolutely loved the "Avatar" (with the blue aliens), yet I know of several internet communities that will never tire at spitting at it. I am fine with it and I never took offense or tried to paint the movie better when I was there. I don't need validation from other people to like what I like.
  - pitaj 4y ago
    You gave your review, and I gave mine. We just have different taste. I wasn't saying you have to like it, but you ended your comment with a statement: "[without nostalgia] it's pretty meh. Same with Blade Runner." that I disagree with. We're allowed to disagree; as you said, it's subjective. Movies like Blade Runner sometimes don't appeal to mainstream audiences. Both BR movies have slow pacing, and often have long shots without dialog. Interstellar is similar in many ways. Avatar is a good movie. Sure, the plot is simple, but it's a groundbreaking film nonetheless. And still quite enjoyable.

moomin 4y ago

A fun thing about those 80s wire-frame graphics: many of them weren’t CGI at all. The desire for the “computer 3D” look was such that quite a few film-makers faked it up using actual 3D models painted to look like wireframe.

dazzawazza 4y ago
The CG from Escape From New York was done in a similar way. https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/12/escape-from-new-york-at-40-how-those-cg-glider-graphics-were-actually-achieved-with-physical-models/ https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/12/escape-from-new-york...
tootie 4y ago
A lot of visuals were just hand-animated. Especially the fluorescent highlights over the human actors. Just drawn on top of the film. Only a handful of sequences were fully digital, but it was still mind-blowing for 1982.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

> The film was even disqualified from the best special effects Oscar, since using computers was considered “cheating”. Hilarious — analogism raises its ugly head.

corrral 4y ago
I get what they mean, though. Computers have made every "making of" for FX-heavy movies super boring, except the few that still have some notable practical work, too.
- falcor84 4y ago
  It's not exactly a "making of", but I found this explanation of the evolution of hair in Disney/Pixar features to be extremely interesting: How Disney's Animated Hair Became So Realistic, From 'Tangled' To 'Encanto' | Movies Insider https://youtu.be/cvTchBdrqdw https://youtu.be/cvTchBdrqdw

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weldedtogether 4y ago

Tron is probably my favorite movie of all time! A fun adventure movie that's amazing to look at through the entire movie thanks to the immense effort put forth by the entire team, even if the story goofs up in a few places. If you have the time, watch The Making of Tron documentary where they go over (and show) some of the processes they used and show them as well! One thing I can't get over in regards to the sequel (Legacy) is how it changed the aesthetic of the computer world from nice bright neon on white and vivid purples to all black and neon blue or orange! Legacy is jam packed with CGI but it's still less visually interesting to look at (in my opinion) because of the lack of color. Not to mention it moves away from the "power to the users/believers" angle of the first film to try and take a philosophical stand on everything that amounts to meaning nothing. Tron is a truly unique movie in everything it did, and my greatest sadness is that nothing that came after it has the same look and feel as the original. The closest we get is the world they had in Kingdom Hearts 2...

lawgimenez 4y ago
One of the movies I don’t mind getting a sequel. One of my favorite movies too.
- weldedtogether 4y ago
  Yeah it clearly struck a chord with a lot of people. I just wish we could have gotten something more of the original aesthetic... seems Legacy has sort of overwritten Tron in a lot of minds of both people and producers. At least the original isn't going anywhere!

epx 4y ago

I’d bet many people here tried to implement Light Cycles AI as one of their first programs

ColinWright 4y ago
Well, given that Tron came out in 1982 and I got my first computer in 1979 ... not me. My first programs were sorting algorithms, then I got tired of how slow the machine was, taught myself Z80 machine code (not assembler, machine code) from a book, figured how to smash the stack, created a machine code monitor, and wrote a compiler to translate up my BASIC programs to Z80.
- jecel 4y ago
  In 1979 my high school friends and I used to play a game on paper that was essentially "light cycles". We used a sheet of graph paper and took turns extending our previous walls (each drawn with a different color using a fancy four color pen) by one more square. None of us has access to computers back then, though our science fair project that year was a microprocessor based video game (using the Signetics 2650). We ran out of time to implement our own games, but "cycles" would have been our second right after "pong". I did not think of having a character at the leading edge of the wall until I watched "Tron", however. And then I did implement it like that on my TI99/4A including the movie's theme music. While I couldn't find the name of the paper version of the game we played, it seems that there was already a two player arcade version in 1976 called "Blockade" by Gremlin.

1MachineElf 4y ago

I was thinking of Tron just a couple hours ago, indirectly, because of public reaction to a video of a recent DJ set. The DJ (named Blessed Madonna, formerly Black Madonna) played Thomas Bengalter's 1995 Ventura. The video was had a lot of clips mixed in reacting negatively to the song and the DJ's skills on her mixing deck. Most of the comments were very disparaging. Knowing who Thomas Bengalter is, a co-founder of Daft Punk, it was bind blowing how people could react so negatively to the same sound behind the acclaimed Tron soundtrack.

racl101 4y ago

I just really liked Wendy Carlos' soundtrack. Still listen to it. It has such a calming presence. Say what you will about Daft Punk and Tron Legacy but the original Tron OST is underrated.

excalibur 4y ago

> Tron was also the first attempt to visualise the digital realm itself – what was then called “cyberspace” but might now be termed “the metaverse”. Every time you use that word, Zuckerberg kills a puppy.