40 years ago, Tron changed sci-fi movies
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IIRC James Clarke (who developed the early graphics chips SGI was famous for) said something like "reality is just 80M polygons a second" (at least, in a gross approximation of how the real world is presented to our neuro-optical system).
For a long time I thought the sandy planes were a mandelbrot-like set, but it’s really a Mickey Mouse logo. :)
After some time working in computer graphics I realized that what I really needed/wanted was renderman and an entire team of animators/technical directors, circa 2010. So, basically subsurface scattering, monte carlo sampling, many light sources, rich models and textures. Obviously, none of that was really accessible at the time Tron or Star Trek II was made, but those movies opened the path for the necessary brain and money investment to make the Pixar rendering computer and the rest is history.
You’re being downvoted, but most of us who saw it when it was originally released were not impressed. My thinking on this is because we were searching for a different aesthetic, likely what we would see much later with Avatar. However, today, the Tron aesthetic has come back in a big way as a retro art style. This is not surprising. It may very well be the case that as contemporaries of the original Tron, it was not intended for our generation, but for the ones who would come later. Perusing art history, this seems to be very much the case. Most generations do not properly appreciate the art from their own time, either because they can’t or they are too focused on their own personal vision of what art should be. I can’t tell you what the real reasons for this are, but I think that the audience is a prisoner of their time, while the artist has more freedom with their vision to see farther than the species is able to do on the level of the group, which is confined by the herd and the status quo.
The fact that realism was not the goal, but a cold, rigid computer world helps explain the art direction.
All I needed was some green wireframes and that font from the account numbers at the bottom of checks! https://www.micr-fonts.com/MICRfont/micrfont.html
Also like futuristic takes on 30's "art deco" that is sometimes done.
In this case it seems to be the art acquiring meaning from its successors.
I miss when "summer blockbuster" meant something other than the 40th Marvel comic movie and the 20th DC comic movie.
E.T.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
TRON
Blade Runner
The Road Warrior
...and Fantasy:
Raiders of the lost Ark ('81 release, but stayed in the theater for 80 weeks)
Conan The Barbarian
The Secret of NIMH
The Last Unicorn
Beastmaster
This is exactly how they lost me. I have no idea which ones I've seen and which I haven't, because from the title or a little blurb, they tend to smudge together. So rather than watching repeats, I just quit.
Super Mario 64 was a similar experience of "wow, this is new!".
Watch a makng of movie to see
There's pleny actual CGI like the light cycles, the recognizer scenes, the MCP, the light sail.
Perhaps the most important role of the CGI is that of a distraction, because aesthetic choices like that tend to work best when you are not aware of them.
There’s also an 8-bit homage to the soundtrack: https://youtu.be/NzRWXn5KNFI
Just not as well known as she should be in recent times.
(Tron Legacy, on the other hand, has a brilliant score, and everything else is a weak point.)
TANK - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEdQ3mwyrQ4
And how it was made:
Glad this got a mention. It may be cheeseball, but I can watch TLS even today and suddenly I’m 12 years-old again.
Another fun movie. I believe the movie didn’t do great with test audiences, but they loved the bits with the alien(?) pretending to be the main character in his place and significantly expanded that part of the movie, which worked out great.
Fairly typical example of Hollywood North re-dressing a city to match its needs.
The building with the parachute base jump is actually the Shangri-La condo tower downtown.
Hmm, it's imho inaccurate to put it that way. I don't think there is a single "generic city" in the US. I think most American villages, towns and small cities look and feel the same (they all have the same CVS, Walgreens etc, you need a car) but when it comes to big cities, US cities are vastly, vastly different. Living in NYC feels nothing like living in Boston, which feels nothing like SF, which feels nothing like LA etc... When someone says "generic American city" I really can't think of any streotypes... E.g. you can say American cities are very car-centric which is 100% correct for e.g. LA. But e.g. NYC and Boston ([1]) are very much the opposite, where arguably it's more comfortable to live without a car (especially the case in Manhattan or Cambridge). Just a few data points, I realize this is not a very important discussion.
[1] I was told Chicago is like this too, unfortunately never lived there myself.
Tron changed cinema, predicted the future of tech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32033622 - July 2022 (107 comments)
You’re right it’s not great on it’s own. You have to be the kind of person who would be interested in what it’s trying to do.
Between that and the poor reviews it’s clear it’s not what they wanted.