'Tron: Legacy' Director Explains the Tron World

An anonymous reader writes "We only had to wait 28 years for the second installment of 'Tron' — the sequel, 'Tron: Legacy,' comes out on Friday. It is expected to have less awesomely bad '80s graphics and more awesomely awesome millennial CGI. In advance of the opening, Discover has an interview with director Joe Kosinski in which he talks about reinventing the light cycle, and explains that the Tron world resembles the Galapagos Islands, where everything evolved in isolation."

Comments

"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[Eunuchswear]

WTF!

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[jdgeorge]

Perhaps the submitter does not understand that Tron's graphics were cutting edge at the time. If he doesn't get off my lawn, I'll have to run him over in my awesomely bad 80s monster truck.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[Talderas]

Kids "terrible taste in entertainment" is a good thing. Even though we can look back on Tron and say. God, that is a horrible film, to a child it spurned his imagination. Imagination is unfortunately repressed in our education system. Inspire it where ever possible.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[6031769]

That will teach me to his submit before rereading my post

Want to bet?

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[Maxo-Texas]

I had the "wonderful kid movie, terrible adult movie" experience with "Escape to Witch Mountain".

However, rewatching Tron did not produce that experience. It was okay and some parts were better than okay. The story about the people/characters was reasonably solid and a good story can overcome weak effects while awesome effects can't overcome weak characters and bad story.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[mcgrew]

Jees, these kids... I was about 30 when Tron came out. Tron's graphics were awesome for the time, better than any of the coin operated video games that were out then that the movie was portraying.

As to the plot, aside from the necessary suspension of disbelief of a) a laser disassembling a human and storing him in a computer and b) true machine intelligence, it was as good or better than the average action flick, let alone one of the old westerns from the '40s.

I was working at Disney when it came out, and got to see a pre-release screening with 72 mm film close to a large screen. The DVD (my copy of which has been stolen, sadly) really paled in comparison to seeing it in 72 mm in the theater.

No, I had no part in making the movie; the pre-release was one of the many perks Disney employees got.

The original Star Trek, on the other hand, DID often have cheesy effects, bad acting, and bad plots, even though a lot of the episodes were and still are awesome.

I fear the new Tron will suck, but hope it doesn't.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[Chelloveck]

Those "awesomely bad 80s graphics" were awesomely good back in, you know, the 80s. I have no doubt that in another 30 years or so, the graphics in Tron Legacy will be just as laughable. And from everything I hear, the original Tron script will read like Shakespeare compared to the new one... Actually, I didn't find the original script too bad. It's certainly not great, but it held up a lot better than I expected it to when I saw it again a couple years ago.

BTW, there's already been a Tron sequel, just in video game form. Tron 2.0 came out in 2003 and was created as being a direct sequel to the original. It even had much of the original cast doing voice work, and Wendy Carlos doing the soundtrack. Find a copy and play it. It's a decent FPS, and it's very much in the spirit of the original movie. I hope there's at least some mention of the events of Tron 2.0 in Tron Legacy.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[Captain Splendid]

This. The original isn't Citizen Kane, but it does hold up better than many of the films that came out during that time. Same goes for the SFX in my opinion (as long as you don't consider ROTJ).

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[vuke69]

The DVD (my copy of which has been stolen, sadly)

Wow, Disney is more serious about suppressing the old version than I had initially suspected.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[raddan]

Huh. Here I am thinking that the story is inspired (anthropomorphizing a computer's internal conflicts and merging them with the real world conflict... well before The Matrix did the same thing) and that the graphics are pretty cool given that most of them were not CGI. The frisbee-battle and the guy-jumps-into-MCP thing at the end are still visually unique to me. Good thing I have it on DVD so I don't have to listen when other people tell me what is "awesomely bad". It would be sufficient to say that Tron was a contributing factor in my decision to become a computer scientist :^)

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[mcgrew]

TRON (yes the name is kinda hokey

TRON is a debugging command in the BASIC programming language. It is an abbreviation of TRace ON. It is used primarily for debugging line-numbered BASIC GOTO and GOSUB statements. In text-mode environments such as the TRS-80 or MS-DOS/IBM PC-DOS, it would print the current line number which was being executed, on-screen. In a windowed environment, when the TRON command had been executed, a window would indicate the line number being executed at that instant. This command's opposite is TROFF, or TRace OFF, used to turn off command tracing.[1]

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[commodore64_love]

Gotta disagree with ye.

I find Tron more rewatchable than Star Wars A New Hope or Return of the Jedi (zzzzz). And I don't think the graphics are bad especially considering they are *supposed* to look like a computer world. If they looked like Gran Turismo 5 (i.e. real) then I wouldn't feel as if I was inside the circuitry.

Of course I also like that "Would You Like to Play A Game?" movie so maybe my taste's just bad. (shrug) Reminds me of my youth.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[TheRaven64]

MCP (which did stand for Master Control Program) was the operating system on Burroughs Large Systems machines, from the B5000 onwards. It was released in 1961, so predated TRON by some time. It was the first OS to support multiple CPUs, the first OS to be written in a high-level language, and the first commercial OS to support virtual memory.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[Nadaka]

Wargames. I re watched it recently. It actually has some of the most realistic representations of hacking and hackers in any movie ever.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[simcop2387]

I believe that War Games vs Sneakers would be a far more interesting match up.

80s graphics were state of the art

[Anonymous Coward]

Those 80s graphics were state of the art in 1980 when the movie started production. It sounds like AC has no idea what the fuck he is talking about. See the "Making of Tron" to understand all the complex work involved.

Don't Diss the 80s

[Nom du Keyboard]

Hey, don't diss the 80s. Those effects were state of the art for their time and deserve better than being said that with 10000X more computer power that we can do better now.

"There's a 68.71% chance you're right."

[mrnick]

End of line.