Tron changed cinema, predicted the future of tech | Hacker News Reader

Tron changed cinema, predicted the future of tech

theguardian.com

186 pointsColinWright116 comments

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!

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

> 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

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).

Ya it’s true now there are some chances to do some tiny tiny steps forward to that by studying the light in the picture that is bouncing. I remember finding a video where they will beam lights against a wall and be able to generate a (very dirty) picture a hidden playing card by seeing how the light bounce (colors, angles, etc…). Maybe in a future where camera with a 100 times better image quality will be standard. If I find it will post it.

It’s like reverse engineering the light.

I just imagined a Spaceballs-esque scene where they shout "Enhance!" and the resulting image is one if those crazy AI generated pictures where everything morphs into some semblance of a cat-but-not-really.

I think a better example of really cool "Bladerunner enhance" tech has a lot less to do with ML and more to do with some of the interesting RAW formats our cameras today are putting out. It's easier than ever for the cameras to capture multi-frames at once even for a "still" shot between advancements in multi-frame compression and expansions in general purpose storage space. It's really interesting to see what Pros with pro tools can do to things like adjust lighting or focus/bokeh in an editing app days/weeks/months after a photo was "taken".

ML is often involved with the non-RAW formats to make some of those focus/lighting adjustments for us non-Pros, but watching what Pros can do to enhance photos that ML cannot if they get access to the RAWs before the MLs toss those files is sometimes incredibly impressive today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing ?

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_field_camera ,

imagine they were using that.

Ah I think that’s what I was trying to find!

That is a pseudo-enhance, because you can’t fix the thermodynamic issue of not having enough information to actually enhance.

Absolutely agree. Tron is in such a weird place for me in that neither movies were particularly great or rank very high in my list of favorite films, yet they both have had a profound impact on me. I quote and reference them all the time and they continue to inspire me artistically and thematically. I'm forever grateful for what they have contributed to pop culture and my life.

End of line.

As a kid, I loved it for obvious reasons. As an adult, I still love it because I really appreciate what how incredibly creative it is.

Does Tron require more disbelief than any other mainstream sci-fi? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Would be interesting to hear what sci-fi movies seem more plausible. 2001 is even stranger and also anthropomorphizes computer programs. In many ways 2001 seems like it was probably a large influence on Tron.

I like your positive take on Legacy, I will need to watch again. Also thanks for the notes on Uprising, I haven’t seen it and now will watch. I did love the original and it’s why the sequel felt flat to me, even though it was absolutely beautifully rendered and the music was awesome. I’m probably being a hypocrite relative to my first paragraph, but one of the things that bugged me about Legacy was the added real-world physics in the computer world, e.g., recognizers blowing dust & smoke. This is a bit ironic, I know, but that cause me to have trouble suspending my disbelief during Legacy. The computer world in the first movie was a mysterious different place that operated on different physics, clearly it was all magnetics and light or something, right? Adding jet engines breaks the premise of the computer world and makes it less mysterious and therefore more boring to me. It does add visual detail, and as a former CG artist, the movie is gorgeous and took a lot of hard work, but just missed the mark for me in terms of why the first one was good. Oh, and the “now that’s a big door!” gag was eye-rollingly goofy, that one also pulled me right out of the movie.

> Does Tron require more disbelief than any other mainstream sci-fi? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Would be interesting to hear what sci-fi movies seem more plausible. 2001 is even stranger and also anthropomorphizes computer programs. In many ways 2001 seems like it was probably a large influence on Tron.

Than any other? For sure. There is a lot less room for imagination when it comes to the inner workings of a computer, something we as a society know a great deal about. It's not hard to think of sci-fi settings that require less disbelief, simply by virtue of taking place somewhere/somewhen very remote to us personally.

it depends on how much you already know about computers...

I'm very very curious about the concept of 'suspend disbelief'.. which from my ongoing analysis, is all about how any fictional story is connected to reality.

I just watched the Moonfall movie and the most impactful thing for me is just how bad it comes out. While it's clear they've studied what's supposed to make a story work; and the dialog and exposition waste NO time, it fails to get me to suspend disbelief.

On the other hand, considering stranger things which does a better job, without being really good (it's just ok), still manages to get me to suspend disbelief much better than that awful movie.

Anybody have anything on suspend disbelief from a narrative (the technique of storytelling) standpoint?

Good question! The WP article is very Wikipedia-ish, but not a bad intro to the issues. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

I’m sure there are much longer/better discussions, and I don’t know where to find those aside from browsing the WP article references.

I generally like the ‘criticisms’ section. I agree with it and and don’t feel like the term suspension of disbelief adequately characterizes what’s going on. There are probably more useful analyses when it comes to understanding how to write stories. Personally I think it’s more about whether the story is 1) good and 2) plausible enough as a fantasy idea, in that order. If it’s not good, the threshold for incorrect physics goes down.

The approach Stranger Things (at least, in the first, best, season) uses to suspend disbelief is to invoke a sense of child-like wonder, AND terror. Our protagonists are, by and large, children, or emerging from childhood into the lived body-horror of being a teenager. We see the world (primarily) through their lens, a lens that magnifies AND simplifies things. They don't understand what's going on, they just _know_ things are happening. Their credibility is established on the basis of "are these things a kid could conceivably think/believe."

Contrast that to media like Moonfall, where the characters are supposed to understand what's happening AND convey that to the audience. That's a much bigger lift. Their credibility is established according to "does this correspond to things an engineer would plausibly say/believe," which not many films get entirely right.

Stranger Things also has one more screenwriting technique going for it - it shows, instead of telling. We are _shown_ 11 being submerged into a tank and transported to the Other, we aren't told that that's whats happening. We are _shown_ the terrors of a mother who's lost her child, we aren't told "oh she's so sad." Show, don't tell, is THE big rule of storytelling, and it's ignored because it's hard to achieve.

EDIT for grammar

> Show, don't tell, is THE big rule of storytelling

This idea has major limits and is by no means absolute. Many sci fi shows fail when they try to show too much, and end up with both bad vfx and bad story. The ones that are standing the test of time are the stories that leave some things up to the imagination, they imply without trying to render every last detail. I honestly think George Lucas was a better director before CG, precisely because he couldn’t show everything he wanted, but had the ability to tell story around the visual gaps. That or good writers and crew.

Can you share some examples? Everyone already knows that faster than light travel isn’t possible, wormholes and AI don’t exist, laser weapons aren’t a thing, time travel is pure fiction, holodecks and transporters have never been invented, and there’s no known life on other planets. In my experience more people understand those things than how computers work. So to me it doesn’t seem like familiarity with the physics is really the issue here. Plus there’s no reason as someone knowledgeable about the inner workings of a computer to assume that Tron is trying to be a literal depiction of the machine, I personally think it’s a given that the story is rendering the programs for narrative, not showing the insides of the computer.

Maybe the most compelling reason that familiarity isn’t the problem is that Tron is disproportionately loved by people who are into computing and is less interesting to people who don’t write code. If disbelief was hampered by familiarity with the subject, then it should be the opposite.

> Anthropomorphize computer programs and invent a BS way of injecting a real human into a computer and Tron is what you get.

Isn't that just another 'rendering' of the transhumanistic upload concept? In this case by destructive laser scanning. Then the 'sample' is running virtualized on some substrate, which in turn can embed that sample into whichever environment it is capable to generate.

Also, genetic algorithms, emergence, AI, yada yada...

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.

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).

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).

You could prep him with decoding games, have him invent a code for you to decode and visa versa. That was a hit when I was a scrub. My brother and I would spend time insulting each other and then had to work at it to decypher the insult. It then felt like a triumph to be insulted and understand it.

> We should watch The Martian

Although the events at the beginning and end of the film require massive suspension of disbelief I rate The Martian as one of my favourite films for presenting an optimistic view of science and engineering, massively realistic by Hollywood standards. I'd definitely suggest watching it.

Ha ha, I so failed my daughters. "Dark Crystal", "Excalibur", and many others ... way too early for them.

They only tell you 15 years later that you scared the shit out of them.

Moon and The Thirteenth Floor are two of my favourite movies which have not received the success they deserved in my opinion, compared to say The Matrix (all three as good and dealing with similar subjects IMO). It's rare but nice to see them mentioned!

Duncan Jones is massively underrated in general. But I fear that with the flop of Warcraft he's gotten the black mark from Hollywood.

I think it was less Warcraft's under-performance in domestic theaters that did that (because it still had huge audiences in Asia; Hollywood accounting is weird, of course, but it was still a profitable movie despite it getting the "flop" branding in the US) and more Mute's flop on Netflix that left a black mark. (Netflix's accounting seems even weirder than Hollywood's, especially given how opaque it is, and also seems to have an outsized impact on the rest of Hollywood for how opaque it is.)

Werewolves from Ghostbuster ? Are we talking the animated Ghostbusters ?

I'm not sure, I saw both the series and the movies.

Probably the hellhounds Zuul and Vinz Clortho.

Errm? Interstellar and no violence? ISTR a scene where they fought to the death, or at least tried to. Some icy cliff, one trying to push the other down there, and fighting on the slope after that.

Tron Legacy is a beautifully done video for the Daft Punk album :)

I'm probably going to be killed by my comment here, but Tron Legacy is my favorite movie!

The atmosphere, music, nostalgia and other things makes it the most enjoyable movie that I know. It's more of a personal connection that really an objective "this is the best movie ever made".

Tron:Legacy is one of my favorite movies. I probably like it more than the original. At the very least, I watch it more often than the original. It's funny though: when I saw it in the theater the first time, I thought it was dragging a bit towards the middle, and was getting a little restless and wondering if this was really the Tron successor I wanted. But then I watched it again later and enjoyed it even more. I've only grown to appreciate it more and more with subsequent viewings. Go figure, right?

I'm not a design or front-end type of mind, but seeing the terminals and visual design in TL inspired me to try working in CSS to achieve the same colors/glow.

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.

The CG from Escape From New York was done in a similar way.

https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/12/escape-from-new-york...

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.

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...

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

One of the movies I don’t mind getting a sequel. One of my favorite movies too.

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!

> The film was even disqualified from the best special effects Oscar, since using computers was considered “cheating”.

Hilarious — analogism raises its ugly head.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Too bad they never made a sequel to Tron: Legacy

it was bad enough not to justify one. Even the CG was horrible.

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.

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. :)

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.

> 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.

> 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 thought it was the opposite? Hollywood accounting, I thought, meant that if the movie even breaks even then it is financially good because they include all costs even the movie theater costs as expenses. What am I missing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

This source [0], which is from a company selling analysis services of movies financials (so probably accurate) say total costs $200m, which likely includes marketing.

Note also that the movie had a sizeable merchandising output, so the $400m box-office doesn't tell the full story; total revenue was probably several millions higher.

[0] https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Tron-Legacy#tab=summary

Double its money seemed to be enough to greenlight a sequel. Disney started work on a sequel almost immediately, it just got stuck in Development Hell. That's the other reason sequels do or do not get made: they still need to be developed as projects with all the pieces of writer/director/script/plan and Hollywood is just as notorious for how much of a hellscape that can be sometimes as they are for their weird, harsh accounting.

> Even the CG was horrible.

There wasn't any. From TFA:

> first attempt to visualise the digital realm itself

Few people realise that in 1982 there was no CGI. Tron is mainly rotoscoped [1] but also a composite of creative effects and techniques.

Tron is a remarkable movie for a different reason most people miss today. It was seminal in defining the aesthetic of computer graphics to come by "faking it till you make it".

Without the actual technology for model wirefame and rendering at the time, the visual directors (Steven Lisberger and Donald Kushner) used a combination of drawn animation (Jean Giraud), special lighting and costume, and actual CGI overlays from the "Super Foonly F-1" PDP-10 [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tron&section=5

I think grand parent wished there was a third movie and parent was complaining about the cgi in the sequel.

> There wasn't any. From TFA:

You probably missed the fact I was talking about the second movie, full of CGI.

Sorry. I can well imagine that the sequel was shite. Also in comparison to the first movie real CGI failed to live up to the "fake" standard set by the first.

There was a full 15 minutes of true CGI in the first film, an incredible accomplishment back in 1982. It was in fact too much CGI for any one company to produce, they had to hire 4 different companies to handle the workload (MAGI, Triple-I, Robert Abel and Associates, and Digital Effects). They broke up the VFX scenes between them, trying to play to the individual strengths of each company's rendering system. If you pay close attention to the film you can tell which scenes were done by which company.

The backgrounds shown during the live action scenes (with actors) were mostly hand drawn.

Much more info here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm4i6D3XXBQ

Thanks for that link. I went back and watched a few clips. My goodness how that's different from my memories of 1982! Weird thing is I can't remember that I saw that 15 minutes of embryonic CGI as being "computer graphics", long before I'd played Wolfenstein and having only seen vector graphics in arcade consoles at the pier. How our perceptions have changed.

The first hour of Tron: Legacy is pretty good. After that, it's almost unwatchable.

Basically this for me with a more positive slant. The first scenes of Sam and into discovering what’s inside the Grid for the first time are absolutely magical.

Then it does really peter out.

There's better tech-related Disney movies like Ralph Breaks The Internet and Ready Player One (full with memes).

RPO is a disappointment full of fanservice. Overall, a much must forgettable movie than Tron: Legacy.

Also, RPO was Spielberg who hasn't worked at all with Disney since the weird conflux of things that was Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and so RPO is nothing like a Disney movie in any sense.

Well theres a lot of [0] rumors fueled by Leto that there‘s going to be sequel at "some" point.

[0] https://screenrant.com/tron-3-movie-update-jared-leto-commen...

They made an excellent prequel though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron:_Uprising

The series was fantastic and much better than the movie IMHO. It's a pity it was cancelled after one season.

Fans should.

Story is king though — it's where the first two failed. If a fan writes a knock-out script it could be awesome.

(Yeah, enough of the Star Wars fan films, kids. There's a lot of other worlds out there that could use some love.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Agreed on all accounts.

BR 2049 is a very bad idea ("an actual sequel to Blade Runner, this many years later? LOL no") that ended up amazing and worked great both as a film and as a sequel, somehow (and by "somehow" I mean "Villeneuve is awesome and we don't deserve him")

Kinda like the Watchmen TV series.

It's a miracle that it worked so well. My props to Denis Villeneuve. It's also too bad that it flopped, but I'm so glad it was made.

Nope. Disagree. Bladerunner blew my mind. 2049 didn't. It had just better graphics, but less 'atmosphere'. IMO.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Might be fun to re-watch with the director’s vision in mind. I changed my mind about Prometheus after reading a long online post about how it’s an allegory to Jesus, and what implications that has on all the plot points and characters. Watching the movie cold I nearly walked out I thought it was so bad, seeing it again after having updated information made it a better experience for me.

Yeah, I don't mind that. :)

I kind of like Tron but that statement from the director isn't something I buy.

There's no spirit world in Tron's plot- the plot is literally about a guy getting zapped into a machine. If it was the director's intent to depict a "spirit world" or "shaman" , he did a poor job of conveying it. Other movies like "Return to OZ" do a much better job of opening themselves up to non literal interpretations by having ambiguity between the "real" world and the "fantasy" world.

What I really get from Tron is it is basically Star Wars with "galaxy far far away" replaced with "CGI computer world". The Tron poster is heavily copied from this famous Star Wars poster:

https://www.starwars.com/news/7-things-you-didnt-know-about-...

Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" influenced Star Wars. So calling your Hollywood formula "mythic" in some fashion was presumably fashionable on account of the success of Star Wars.

I kind of like Tron but the plot is very simple, and very literal. It doesn't really come to life the way Star Wars does, or open itself up to interpretation like more symbolic films.

If the director really wanted us to see the film as shamanic, he probably shouldn't have used such a clunky plot device as a laser beam that makes someone enter a computer.

> If the director really wanted us to see the film as shamanic, he probably shouldn't have used such a clunky plot device as a laser beam that makes someone enter a computer.

That was my favorite scene!

But I don't think the director "wanted us to see the film as shamanic". I think this is getting it backwards. The director wanted us to see it as a science-fiction adventure.

Star Wars was certainly not the first movie to use science-fiction for mythological or religious themes. Science-fiction is rarely about science.

It's not that Star Wars was the first movie to use science-fiction for mythological or religious themes but Star Wars is the first I know of famous for being inspired by Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell claimed all myths follow the same formula which he called the monomyth.

You look at the poster of Tron and it's Luke Skywalker imagined as a computer program with the pose and lightsaber glow from the Star Wars poster.

If you buy Joseph's Campbell's claims that all myth follows a formula then adventure film making is about casting a Luke Skywalker Monomyth figure in a difference setting (wild west setting, computer setting, crime ridden urban setting, samurai setting etc.) and just telling the same story over and over and claiming you are doing something spiritual.

I don't particularly buy that view of filmmaking but I see the director's comment about Shamanism in that context seeing as Tron seems to borrow a bit of inspiration from Star Wars.

> If you buy Joseph's Campbell's claims that all myth follows a formula

I don't. And I don't think anybody who have seriously studied myths and folktales buy it.

I don't buy Campbell's theories either but I think it's fair to say Joseph Campbell seriously studied myth and folktales and believed his theory so you can't really say nobody who has seriously studied myth and folktales bought into it.

I know the director of Mad Max has referenced discussion of Mad Max as a version of the Monomyth, so that's at least two Hollywood directors who were inspired by it, I'm sure there are significantly more.

Oh yeah lots of Hollywood scriptwriters have studied Campbell, it is part of the reason all movies look alike today.

I'm just saying it is bullshit that historical myths and folklore follow such a template. But blockbuster movies definitely does these days.

Joseph Campbell was encyclopedic in his education and analysis. Hero With a Thousand Faces persuaded me.

But his thesis is not that all mythology boils down to one simple story. His thesis is more like the website tvtropes: there are recurring identifiable patterns in cultural teaching stories.

Siskel & Ebert also agreed that it had no plot to speak of. But they gave major kudos to Jeff Bridges for carrying the movie in spite of that fact.

https://youtu.be/YMIkU7YaOGo

“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.

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

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.

> 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?

Idiocracy is basically the new 1984

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