Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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