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Tron: Legacy — Too Much Imagination Required?
MoldySpore writes "Stepping back from the positive and negative reviews of the new Tron sequel, Tron: Legacy (which has so far amassed over $111,000,000 world-wide), something occurred to me after seeing the movie and reading the numerous reviews. It seems many of the reviews, and perhaps the reviewers themselves, can be split into two categories: those who saw the original Tron when it came out and can put the new movie in context, and those who either watched Tron recently to prepare for the sequel or never saw it and jumped right into the new movie."
Read on for the rest of MoldySpore's thoughts.
"While nostalgia plays an important role in any franchise's resurrection, technology has come so far in the 28 years since the original release of Tron, it would seem the human imagination regarding technology has become somewhat disenchanted. Back in 1982, most anyone who saw Tron (or a few years after, as it garnered 'cult classic' status) was captivated, not just by the amazing computer-generated graphics of the time, but about the possibility of a world inside a computer system, where programs walk around and interact with each other like humans, where bits and bytes are interactive things you could touch and see, and where artificial intelligence was something to be feared (in the form of the MCP) rather than embraced.
Most of my friends were born in the '80s, and the ones that saw the original Tron were much more open to the storyline of Tron: Legacy than the ones who never saw the original or who watched it only recently to prepare for watching the new movie. While they all agreed the CG and 3D was amazing, they felt the story was 'unimaginative' or 'run-of-the-mill.' Also, many people born later, such as my younger sister, who is very tech savvy herself, seemed to dismiss the plot and characters completely, instead speaking only of the quality of the graphics and the music. I believe this speaks to how the human race has grown out of its own imagination when it comes to technology since it entered the digital age. Young people can't see past the fact that there isn't a world inside the computer, that programs are just tools to be used by humans, and artificial intelligence is something discussed on a daily basis.
I'd be interested to hear what the Slashdot community's experiences and feelings have been about the new movie and its effect on the people who went and saw it. Imagination is something uniquely human and has always played an important part in our ability to look past our current limitations. With negative reviews of the new movie often referencing the 'sub-moronic script that feels like it was written by people who had never used a computer,' has some of this been lost now that digital technology is part of our daily lives? Does this signal a movement toward humans becoming indifferent to technological advances, and by association, the hindering of outside-the-box thinking when it comes to technology?"
"While nostalgia plays an important role in any franchise's resurrection, technology has come so far in the 28 years since the original release of Tron, it would seem the human imagination regarding technology has become somewhat disenchanted. Back in 1982, most anyone who saw Tron (or a few years after, as it garnered 'cult classic' status) was captivated, not just by the amazing computer-generated graphics of the time, but about the possibility of a world inside a computer system, where programs walk around and interact with each other like humans, where bits and bytes are interactive things you could touch and see, and where artificial intelligence was something to be feared (in the form of the MCP) rather than embraced.
Most of my friends were born in the '80s, and the ones that saw the original Tron were much more open to the storyline of Tron: Legacy than the ones who never saw the original or who watched it only recently to prepare for watching the new movie. While they all agreed the CG and 3D was amazing, they felt the story was 'unimaginative' or 'run-of-the-mill.' Also, many people born later, such as my younger sister, who is very tech savvy herself, seemed to dismiss the plot and characters completely, instead speaking only of the quality of the graphics and the music. I believe this speaks to how the human race has grown out of its own imagination when it comes to technology since it entered the digital age. Young people can't see past the fact that there isn't a world inside the computer, that programs are just tools to be used by humans, and artificial intelligence is something discussed on a daily basis.
I'd be interested to hear what the Slashdot community's experiences and feelings have been about the new movie and its effect on the people who went and saw it. Imagination is something uniquely human and has always played an important part in our ability to look past our current limitations. With negative reviews of the new movie often referencing the 'sub-moronic script that feels like it was written by people who had never used a computer,' has some of this been lost now that digital technology is part of our daily lives? Does this signal a movement toward humans becoming indifferent to technological advances, and by association, the hindering of outside-the-box thinking when it comes to technology?"
I'm in the group of people who just recently saw the first movie just yesterday, in fact. I was born the year after the original was released so was too young to get to see it early on. I also grew up with computers and scifi/fantasy and can say that I knew what Tron was going in. It was a move from the early 80's. It was groundbreaking for the time. I did feel it was a bit cheesy, but I blame that more on Disney than anything else. If you expect something amazing and epiphany-making, you're going to get let down. If you expect it for what it was at the time, you'll enjoy the hour-and-a-half you spend watching it.
-SaNo
The reviews I've seen have tried (and failed) to cast C.L.U. as a clueless (pun intended) bad guy. But he wasn't a bad guy, he was Flynn's idealism wrapped up in a program. The movie is more about idealism and the folly of trying to attain perfection than it is about any sort of struggle between good and evil.
It doesn't matter how old you are, or how you felt about the original movie. This one apparently has good graphics with a poor plot. Both reviews quoted in TFA were basically negative on the movie. Ebert thumbed his up to three by liking the visuals, but he said several times in his short piece that the movie is essentially plotless. The following quotes are all from his review:
I'm giving this more attention than the movie does, which is just as well. Isaac Asimov would have attempted some kind of scientific speculation on how this might all be possible, but "Tron" is more action-oriented.
"Tron: Legacy," a sequel made 28 years after the original but with the same actor, is true to the first film: It also can't be understood, but looks great.
It may not have legs, because its appeal is too one-dimensional for an audience much beyond immediate responders. When "2001" was in theaters, there were fans who got stoned and sneaked in during the intermission for the sound-and-light trip. I hesitate to suggest that for "Tron: Legacy," but the plot won't suffer.
None of those are positive statements with respect to the plot.
CG is fine for avoiding expensive trips to filming locations in the remotest corners of the globe, or for rendering places that aren't there. But it's in no way a supplement to a plot. Transformers, 2012, Doom, etc., all proved that flashy visuals can turn a profit, but they can't turn suck into a movie worth watching.
John
I was in my 20's when the first Tron was released. Back then, computers were magical mysterious things. Today, your cell phone probably has more computing power than the computers used on the original Tron and amazing CGI is everywhere. Any kid with a cheap computer can do stuff that rivals the best movie effects of 30 years ago.. As a result, people aren't as impressed by fancy computer graphics as they used to be, and they notice that "hey, this story line and acting is pretty lame.
I believe this speaks to how the human race has grown out of its own imagination when it comes to technology since it entered the digital age.
Or maybe the movie simply wasn't very imaginative, or at least was less imaginative than the original. The movie had very little to do with technology, besides being a visual backdrop. It was just another "problem in fantasyland" movie that didn't capitalize on anything besides the audio/visual aspect.
Look, I recalled Tron being an awesome movie all my life. Then I watched it a couple years ago. Actually, to be accurate, I *tried* to watch it a couple years ago. I didn't even make it half way before I pulled the rip-cord. That movie was so uneventful and droll and boring that I could not force myself to sit through the rest of it. And not boring as in "slow paced, but methodical". It was just boring as in "nothing happens and it rests entirely on special effects, which while amazing at the time haven't been impressive for twenty years".
As a result, I have zero interest in watching a remake or a sequel. Not everything from your childhood needs to be recreated and re-experienced and a lot of it just flat out sucked and still sucks. Or was great, but sucks today. On top of it, the sound track is fucking awful. That fucking Daft Punk theme they keep playing everywhere to promote it is a bunch of ear blistering feedback. I love me some Daft Pun, but jesus christ. It's like listening to a 28.8 modem handshake set to some sort of percussion.
And don't give me that "it's a great movie, you just have to understand it" bullshit. Sometimes shit is just shit, even if you try hard to convince yourself that it's just too over your head for you to grok the awesomeness.
Also . . . who the fuck cares about 3D?
With negative reviews of the new movie often referencing the 'sub-moronic script that feels like it was written by people who had never used a computer,'
Possibly not. Unix commands are shown being used when the OS12 is put on the net and goes haywire. There's all kinds of other open-source ideology being tossed about. I think they did a good job appealing to the true geeks while pleasing the other average moviegoing morons. You just have to look for the little things. I also loved the neo-retro elements like the old synthesizer sounds in the soundtrack.
One thing I didn't appreciate was all the hokey self-reference to the original (the poster and other merchandise in the kid's room, the original arcade machine, etc.). The symbolism of going into the basement of one's own hangout and dusting off the old memories(to get into the grid) was laying it on a little thick, also being hokey as hell. They should've just did it lawnmower-man style and put the portal inside the corporate tower.
I've also realized that the numbers from 1 - 10 can be put into two different groups; numbers from 1-3 and from 4-6 or 7-10.
No, not enough imagination used.
Ok, yeah, I was born in the 80s and didn't see the movie in the theaters, but I saw the movie originally at a young enough age to have a lot of that same sense of nostalgia. Make of that what you will. It's just full disclosure.
The plot did suck, but not because it had a script that felt like "it was written by people who had never used a computer". Clearly anyone who is familiar with the Tron universe knows that Legacy fit in fine. It sucked because it was cliche, it sucked because it was predictable, it sucked because Kevin Flynn was played by The Dude (though, too their credit, they tried to turn him in to a monk, it's too bad they didn't pull it off). On a personal note, it sucked because neither Imax nor 3D added anything to the film, but I got suckered in to the insane ticket prices anyway.
Even so, it was a fun ride, and I can't wait to own it. I just certainly won't be paying attention to it for the plot, though. I'll probably just be using it to show off my HDTV.
The alleged whiz kid head of Entcom engineering tried to stop Kevin Flynn's upload by punching in something like
kill -9 `ps -ef | grep scp`
What a lamer!
I've never seen the original as I was to young when it came out, but I quite enjoyed the new one. It was defiantly one of my favourite releases this year. The friends I watched it with also enjoyed it a lot and had similar opinions. Then again I do watch a lot of SciFi.
I also felt that as movies go it was reasonably realistic (apart from programs being able to exit the computer), although not possible with our current level of technology. I disagree with the OP I think people still have a lot of imagination about tech, but they tend not to associate SciFi tech with the real world and real world advances. Also the movie really didn't have much of a focus on the tech involved it was more about coporate greed and idealism. As well as the impossibility of perfection and the standard Disney themes.
In relation to movies released this year it didn't come close to Inception, but it was a lot better then Harry Potter 7 and at least as good as Avatar. Most people I know who have seen it share this opinion.
null
In 1982, would most who saw Tron (or a few years after, as it garnered 'cult classic' status) been watching with a friend/parent/loved one who could draw them into the tech 'magic' of computers. ;)
Todays well educated young people might respond to the movie as the 1980's people would to a toaster doco or car movie ie. known tech
Thats the problem with remakes, people start to feel a few basic scripts are been rewarmed a few to many times by people with the skills and cash to create.
As for AI, the real question is when did they just go for really fast sorting and matching
Early 1980 gave us the AI vision, in 2011 can we have the fast database movie?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The original Tron was imaginative because it introduced concepts which were fantastical relative to our knowledge at the time. Tron Legacy doesn't achieve this. Admittedly a tall order, given its source material is nearly 3 decades old. That said, still an entertaining film. Most reviews were perhaps a tad harsh.
I think the people that saw the original Tron at the time remember it as a much better movie than it really was. You're spot on when you say the original Tron heavily relied on special effects at the expense of story. While we all decry that sort of thing as laziness and lack of imagination these days, when we think back to that original movie we think of how cool it looked to us at the time, and gloss over the bad parts (like the plot and the pacing). The only imagination required to appreciate the new Tron is the imagination it takes to believe your nostalgic view of the original is an accurate measure of the quality of the film.
Disney tried to basically do the same thing with this movie, relying heavily on special effects. Unfortunately for them, and hopefully fortunately for the future of movie making, the movie-watching public may finally be getting to the point where cutting-edge technology is not enough to save bad movies. Maybe we'll finally get to where the big blockbuster movies actually have to have a coherent plot instead of relying purely on whiz-bang graphics. Of course, believing in such a future may take more imagination (or self-delusion) than believing either Tron movie is any good.
"Tron: Legacy (which has so far amassed over $111,000,000 world-wide)" Are they reporting all Tron statistics in binary now?
That would be me, my wife, her son and daughter in law and their 3 teenage boys (the grandkids)
I think we had the entire spectrum of possible viewers there that night.
I saw the film when it came out in 1982 and remember how great it was in the context of the day.
My wife saw it but doesn't remember much because she was too busy being a Mom and dealing with her 8 year old SON who she had apparently taken to the theater to see TRON.
She spend most of the movie saying "I don't understand what is going on, which one is Tron? They all look alike, I don't remember any of this".
Her son (now 36) sat silently and did not comment. I'm pretty sure he lapped it up but did not want to admit it to his kids.
And while the movie is on I am trying to explain the context of the original to the 3 boys who see an arcade filled with video games and think WTF is up with that?
They paid attention and just dealt with it.
As soon as it was done, the youngest went outside and made a snowman while the other 2 made a few comments about how dull the story was.
That and a discussion ensued about "Why do movies always make the future look like flat grids and cubes and things?" Which then became a discussion of vector graphics which then bored the hell out of them.
Then my wife and I took the 3 grandkids to Tron: Legacy in 3D yesterday.
I personally thought the story was better and that it was not really necessary to have seen the original, my wife agreed but then she will forget what Tron:Legacy was about in a month or so anyways.
However, she was obsessed with how they got Jeff Bridges to look old and young in the same film.
The 3 teenage boys had a great time with the new film and during the *very* short discussion that followed before they began to wrestle they decided that they liked seeing the original before the new one.
This was a surprise for me.
One of them pointed out to the others "Hey remember how dated the original looked and it was only 27 years old? How do you think this film is going to look to us in 27 years?" This then started a discussion about the future and technology that stopped as soon as they got home and started a snowball fight.
I like microcars
Of which there were many. Or rather there are parts of the plot that make almost no sense and seem bolted on to try to give some meaning to a pretty thin plot. The whole ISOs concept, for being as important as it was supposed to be was glossed over in a 30 second flashback that didn't answer any questions... heck, it barely asked any. The idea of Tron being the right hand henchman and Flynn recognizing him at the end... pointless and really unexplained. Did Flynn recognize Tron because he was upside down or something? I mean that was the only thing that seemed to give away who he was. I just couldn't grasp the motivation of nearly anyone in the whole story and the dialog rivals Attack of the Clones for stilted and wooden (did Sam ever put more than 4 words together in a sentence... actually, more than 4 syllables?). All in all, I was really disappointed with the story. But then again, I saw the original Tron in theaters when I was 8 and thought it was awesome. Seeing it again recently it seemed pretty cheesy, yet it's overriding principles of individualism vs. central control (anti-Soviet propaganda even?) and parallels between real world people and programs displayed better ideas than Legacy. And call me old but Journey and Eurythmics were the best part of the score for me. Don't know why all the hype for Daft Punk.
So in decimal that's $448. Honestly, I expected better.
The original Tron was pretty poor *as a movie*, but nevertheless I enjoyed it, and continue to enjoy it today. What it really came down to, though, was that the movie was *extremely* metaphorical, and that those metaphors made sense in the context of computing at the time. (And in fact those metaphors hold up today, which is what makes the movie so much fun to watch today.)
The new Tron: Legacy didn't actually try to play with metaphors. It used the old ones from time to time, and it threw in some Unix and open-source allusions here and there (inappropriately, I might add), but other than that it just spent its effort on making things look pretty.
As a side-note: my reading of the movie is that the central theme of the movie is that open-source is good, but that the GPL is bad. And Clu is Richard Stallman. My review (which doesn't go into that in detail, admittedly) is here.
The movie is "meh". Wait for the DVD.
The only reason it did well is that a lot of people needed to see something during the holiday season, and the competition is very weak.
I noticed the split as well, but had put it down to movie critics vs. the folks who actually go to see movies because they want to enjoy them. You might have put your finger on the real cause of the split, though.
This is a film people either love or hate. Personally, I think that just about everyone involved is really just now getting their feet under them is also a factor. It wouldn't surprise me to see an even/odd factor similar to the one in the Star Trek movies take form.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I don't think people get it. Even when the original Tron came out, nobody really believed that there was actually a world inside a computer. I was 10 at the time and even at that age it was obvious the concept was pure fantasy. What it did inspire in me at the time was the possibility of the computer as a creative medium, expressed not only in the cgi animation but in the analogy of the programmer as a creator of a world. I credit the movie with inspiring me to pursue a career in computer science, by showing that it could be a creative field that could inspire, at a time when the only other facet being shown of computers were of a deeply logical and unfeeling world. For me the most important legacy of Tron was the metaphor of the programmer as a creator and an artist.
As i read what you said i can say thats 3 people....And i'll say it is a good movie compared to the crud that has come out lately. BUT then its not a star wars but some of the affects were neat.
Did anyone ask him?
Some people don't get that Tron is a classic fantasy story, set in a technical setting. It's not a science fiction film trying to create some realist believable technology. People don't question "The Force" or Hobbits, but the do question "User Power" and Isos. As soon as you find yourself asking "Why does Flynn age?" or "Why does Flynn eat?" you've already decided that you were not going to watch the film for it's storyline, but instead for some preconceived idea about the technology is should portray.
Allow me to reiterate. Tron is a fantasy story. It's a simple adventure, about getting from point a to point b and being betrayed along the way. Heck it damn near parallels the Lord of the Rings, if you can accept the Flynns disk (or Tron's in the first film) is the ring and the I/O tower (or MCP in the first film) is the volcano, or what every they throw the ring into.
Having not yet seen Tron: Legacy, the most important question for me is:
Does Bruce Boxleitner whip out the tactical nukes at any point? After B5, I'm not sure I can take the man seriously without at least passing mention of atomic devastation. :)
I guess that means that Tron: Legacy is about the GNU Public License.
If so, then yes, that means that Clu represents Richard Stallman.
But Clu spent the whole film trying to kill Sam Flynn, who is the only character who actually promotes something like free software.
Come to think about it Sam seems a bit like the young Steve Jobs. He is orphaned, a bit of a smart arse, rich....
Perhaps in Tron 3 he turns the occupants of the grid into slaves to drive his domination of the market for laptops and phones.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You hit the nail on the head with the "magical mysterious" description of computers. I was 10 when Tron came out, and I had just gotten my first home computer - a TI-99/4A. This was the era in which computers finally began to make inroads to the home, and the C64, TI-99/4A and Atari 800 could be found set up and running in every Sears and KMart across America. Those that could fire up one of those computers (which all started out in the BASIC command environment) and could type "10 PRINT "DAN WAS HERE"; 20 GOTO 10 were demigods capable of working voodoo in this newfangled technological world. Everyone knew computers were the future, and that each home should probably have one, albeit for reasons they couldn't quite pin down (this might save me 10 minutes a month balancing my checkbook!).
For those of us that did know computers, the "ENCOM" mainframe in which the Tron world unfolded was hardware of unfathomable complexity, power and scale. Our home computers were puny things, that could only do one thing at a time and were totally stand-alone. Who knew what could happen in hardware of that magnitude! The sky's the limit! Of course now we all know that the only difference between a C64 and the most powerful supercomputer in the world is how fast it can calculate, and the convenience of accessing memory (swapping out billions of 5.25" discs by hand over the course of billions of years of computing doesn't sound very fun). The whole "Turing complete" deal sort of takes away the magic attributed to raw scale and complexity of computing devices.
But my point in running my mouth endlessly is to say that when Tron came out, computing was a new frontier, and all it took was to throw in a few "factually correct" constructs (like the Bit, for example) to totally reel kids like me in hook line and sinker. Just like Star Wars, which elicited awe and astonishment in those of us that saw visuals on the big screen the likes of which had never been seen before, it was a movie with irreproducible impact and significance grounded firmly in the very era of which it was a product. The "story" Tron would never be written in today's world - it is simply too naive, metaphorical and anthropomorphic for today's highly advanced technological world.
Better known as 318230.
... As a result, people aren't as impressed by fancy computer graphics as they used to be, and they notice that "hey, this story line and acting is pretty lame.
And this is why Avatar (Pocahontas in Space) did so well? Avatar had great CG, and a horrible, flat, and over used story line and plot. Fern Gully was a much better take on that story. My problem is that now-a-days too many movies are sold only on their craptacular CGI and "3D", and so few of them have any plot that has not been told by 6 other movies better.
You're reading too much about the state of human imagination for what clearly is a Thanksgiving / Christmas season action movie blockbuster.
Seriously? If anything, the plot for Tron: Legacy is too unimaginative. I was struck by how many possible ways the movie could have been made more interesting. So many things were either left unexplained or unused, like questions of how Tron was subverted, and how it could have been used against the protagonists (note that Kevin Flynn's disc was, at some point, in the hands of CLU -- imagine the mischief that CLU would have been able to do on his user's code!).
But they didn't want to overwhelm the audience. Fine enough. They didn't want to mess around with the status quo either, so they made the female love interest into the McGuffin, too. Notice how much of a sausage-fest this current Tron was? I mean, come on.
Mind you, Cillian Murphy's line that the latest ENCOM Operating System "is the most secure thing ever" was amusing, and indicative of how Hollywood thinks. Obviously the way to keep something secure, reasons Hollywood, is to not release the code to ever increasing scrutiny, to keep it hidden.
Ha, stupid Hollywood. That is why you will fail.
I would inline the 'Not Sure If Serious' image.
hardly. In the original a user could actually do stuff programs couldn't and was pretty dang powerful. In this new movie the user was a puss.
That's where the story and plotting failed, and failed miserably.
I'd say that the Tron: Legacy doesn't require you to have an imagination, it just requires you to nod your head and agree to all of the stupid stuff that happens in the movie. Here's the best review I've read on Tron: Legacy. http://tronlegacyreview.wordpress.com/ It catalogs all of the significant problems with Legacy.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Probably is too little imagination what is needed to enjoy that movie. You start with a virtual world, your body gets digitized and gets into it and... well, somewhat, you get old (ok, you as user, your avatar keeps being of the same age), you need to eat and drink (and if well the water looks like something of that world, the food shown definately belong to this one) and sleep, even and specially when time matters.
For me the movie was a wasted opportunity. They had the chance to do an epic movie, something that updated that vision of virtual world to our current knowledge (keeping the look, but i.e. exploring evolved AIs, making programs not so unidimensional, giving them something to live for, ideas of networking not limited to team play, etc) and they seem to had focused more in the special effects and music than in the argument. Make me remember an ST:TNG episode where they found a Dyson sphere, and just visit it to rescue the old Enterprise engineer.
Suspension of disbelief is much easier when you are young, impressionable, and don't totally understand computers. That said, if you're going to have an unrealistic plot, better not to skirt the boundaries of realism too much. Both Tron movies work better than garbage like The Net precisely because they abandon all pretense of being realistic and base it on supremely fantastical notions. For this reason an "old" guy like me (35) was able to enjoy Tron Legacy's premise and characters. But although the plot started out well enough it ended up in a confusing mess.
With how Hollywood is today my expectations were very low to begin with. However, I enjoyed the movie, it was kinda like a rehash of the first movie and im sure alot of people were expecting it to have a weak storyline anyway. With the great deal of eye candy, superb music, and somewhat simple writing, it was worth the money I spent to see it.
On the scale of 0 through 10, I'd give this movie a 10 for visuals, a 10 for music and sound effects, a 10 on costumes, a 4.5 on story and about a 3 on heart.
Those of us with some love for the original movie are somewhat more inclined to let the lack of heart slide, or to view it through nostalgia-tinted eyes and not think about it too much.
One of the basic problems is that I didn't like most of the main characters. I found it hard to empathize with Sam Flynn; he was incredibly privileged yet pointlessly emo. (By the end of the movie, he has set aside his emo-ness but I'm not sure quite why, probably because I don't understand why he was so emo to start with.) Kevin Flynn was more of the actual protagonist than Sam, but he spent much of the movie doing nothing and saying that doing nothing was the right thing to do; and the scene where he is reunited with his son didn't have the emotional impact it deserved. (From Kevin Flynn's point of view, he hadn't seen his son in centuries at least, centuries where it must have eaten at him to wonder what was happening in the real world.) CLU was an unsatisfying villain, especially if you compare him to Sark and MCP from the original. The only character I actually liked was Quorra.
It would have helped if we could have seen more emotion. Did Sam believe his father had run away and abandoned him? That would explain the emo, but we didn't get a scene that suggested it. Did Kevin feel hatred for CLU, for the horrible things CLU had done? Did he feel anguish, that something he created had gone so far wrong? He talked about the situation like some sort of chess game: "Any move we make helps him win" or something like that.
Despite the flaws, I'm glad I saw it, and I actually hope they will make another one right away. I wish they would get a really good script for the next one, one with a bit more heart. All this needed was a better script and it could have been a great movie instead of just a good one.
P.S. As a geek, I care about continuity, and there were egregious continuity breaks with the original. Programs in the original just wanted to drink some electricity, but now they have actual food and drink. In the original, Kevin Flynn had powers because he was a user; in this movie, Sam Flynn didn't seem to have any user powers, and Kevin Flynn had rather limited powers for someone who had had centuries to refine them. (I wanted to see the two of them fighting together like a pair of Jedi.) Did I want to see bits? *+YES+* Did the movie have any? *-NO-* And it would have been great to see Cindy Morgan in at least a cameo. (I wish the plot line had said that Sam had been adopted by Alan and Lora after Kevin disappeared!)
The costumes look totally different, but I don't count that as a continuity violation; it was UNIX now instead of an IBM mainframe, so of course all the programs were cooler-looking.
P.P.S. There were some cool plot ideas in the TRON 2.0 video game, and I would like to see those ideas used in future movies. What if shadowy government agencies got the TRON laser technology, and started sending agents into the Internet to spy on computers, sabotage systems, or even assassinate people? What if data errors during the laser digitizing process caused people to go insane or even become mutant-looking monsters in the computer world? How about a scene where someone (say, Alan) is in grave danger in the real world and Sam has to protect him from the computer world, by hacking?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
TRON is about the world inside the computer. Pure and simple. It's a blend between our world and some concepts of information processing and pits "Good" vs. "Evil". TRON was new, the graphics were amazing for the time, and computers were just making inroads into our daily lives. For most people at the time this started with video games, and dad's PC with boring accounting software. Things like a bit being either "yes" or no" were incorporated into the movie.
TRON Legacy was a bit of a letdown. I imagined a fantasically advanced, internetworked world of TRON, with the "programs" being way more aware of the users (since user-friendlyness etc. since the early 80s) but being cut off through some sort of MCP re-instatement (hint at government-trying-to-control-the-Internet). The world that was presented to me looked even smaller than the original. Game Grid, Flynn Hideout, and I/O port and that was basically it. In the 1982 the Atari 800 had 48k of RAM max. Nowadays desktop PCs have 8GB. Mainframe systems have seen similar orders-of-magnitude increases. But still more or less the same tiny world. So there's a bar now. It has "MP3 programs".
The angle with the ISOs (this of course being a reference to CD and DVD images, another "modern computer age buzz word") is new but not at all worked out.
All in all, hopefully there will be a TRON3 where it is revealed that Sam Flynn went actually back to a Virtual Machine that was running inside the Real World of TRON, set up by Clu and using an ISO program to pose as Kevin Flynn so Sam would think it's all over and never return. Because Quorra is a real ISO who has their memory tampered with, Sam finds out about the deception and returns to Real World of TRON (which is as one would expect of 30+ years of progress).
Tron is no more Scifi than Starwars was. Just because there's space or computers involved in the plot does not make it Scifi. I'm not saying either were bad movies, but really, if every single aspect of the movie is scientifically impossible it's FANTASY not science fiction.
Look at this garbage: http://www.imdb.com/chart/scifi
WALL-E is Scifi?
The Thing?
Back to the Future?
The Iron giant?
The fact of the matter is, most people don't know enough about science to know this stuff isn't possible. But today most people DO know enough about computers to know that Tron isn't possible. Now if we could figure out how to make relativity required for facebook updates we might get somewhere.
This is the only question that is meaningful.
Funny, I see it the other way around. I was a big fan of the original Tron since I was a little kid, and even today I could appreciate the plot that entangled religion and politics in the little details. This is where Tron Legacy let me down: it was a cheesy Hollywood hack-job of a plot, about an absent father and his confused son. It was unconvincing on its own, but more importantly it completely dismissed the almost-cohesive fantasy world of the original film, where the users were seen as mythical god-like beings. In this one, it seemed as though every "program" knew what was up - a hard sell, considering the only actual user inside the system was Flynn.
The resultant hodge-podge of flashy action was then edited to hell, with terribly uneven pace and giant holes in its two-line plot. It really felt like someone looked at the Tron trailer and DVD back cover, borrowed the basic styling and made everything else up without any understanding or prior knowledge of the Tron world. The result is a delight for the senses that dulls the mind.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
There has got to be a snarky comment in here somewhere about the films reflecting the attitudes of the computer makers of their times regarding the amount of control users should have over their devices...
I think the only part that I got interested in was Quorra becoming human. They could make a WHOLE movie about that, did you know? What does it mean to be human? Why is pain so awful? What are these things called emotions? Et cetera.
I expected to see more stuff about "the user has superpowers" that Flynn displayed in the original TRON (after all, he's the USER). But I guess they chickened out from being compared to Matrix just because the user can do things that programs can't.
Anyway, the 3D was awesome and I got out of the theater with a smile. It was a nice weekend.
I thought the movie was good enough. Of course, I grew up with Tron on VHS in the 80s and watched it many, many times (nearly as many as Star Wars). I'm sure that has me biased, but I still thought it was good enough.
** SPOILER WARNING **
The whole Isos concept was lame - like a digital evolution or some garbage nonsense. Suspension of disbelief is a skill required for most movies, and this one is no different.
In my opinion Johnny Mnemonic and Matrix stuck two very powerful tentpoles into the idea of cyberspace, but Matrix 1 was ahead of them by a decade, so those examples weren't around to study from. In fact, we barely had any SF to study from. I think we have a Sense of Wonder discussion going on here. Track the year carefully.
1981 was pretty blah for home PC's.
1982 saw Tron in Summer and a Commodore 64 for Christmas. That's a combo that wouldn't be topped for easily 5 years. Maybe not even until Windows 95 announced MS-Borg.
Put a little edgily, I predict we only have about 3 years of computer consolidation left before we hit a big chasm of "what now". (Call it Android 4.1 ish, iPhone 6, Son of Java after Oracle loses part of its lawsuit, Windows 8, Mac OS11, Ubuntu LTS after they fix Unity, etc, your choice of 5 more.)
Then we will get seriously "technologically bored" and see a small but durable spike in cabin-fever type mood and eternal-september stuff. It might be a little dystopian after we lose some of the copyright & neutrality battles.
So what's *after* that to really excite us?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Bad Typo, I meant Tron 1 was ahead by decade.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
As a result, people aren't as impressed by fancy computer graphics as they used to be, and they notice that "hey, this story line and acting is pretty lame.
I've seen lots of bad movies and panned them on IMDB only to be rebuffed by people that think it was "The BEST movies Ever!!!11!!!". Current example, Skyline, which is one giant CGI fest with zero plot, bad acting, and cardboard characters. I think too many movies these days are relying on the F/X instead of the story.
Also, I saw Tron when it first came out. It bored me to tears. I will not be suffering through Tron: Legacy.
Or it could have been The Matrix. When I heard that they were going to make a Tron sequel, my first thought was that the inside of the computer was supposed to represent how the graphics of the day looked. Since today we have photo realistic graphics, everything would have too look real. Thus, good or bad, The Matrix.
The new movie reflects the new reality. User's don't control the programs and you don't need a matrix to suck energy from humans. Look at Facebook and a host of Farmville-like apps and the control the apps have over users... and I thought WoW and Evercrack were bad, but they were just the tip of the iceberg as they were too complicated for the less than average user, which Facebook clearly makes up for.
Really, as a movie it wasn't very good. It's plot was a strange combination of overused cliche's that were forced into a "modern" setting with much of it left up to the watcher to fill in. If you were technical enough with a good imagination you filled in the blanks to where you liked it, if not then it was just pretty graphics that even 5 years later didn't look that good. Even then most of the enjoyment was technical, not really to do with the story or cinematography.
I liked it and still do today, but I do so because someone somewhere in the process had a good combination of understanding of technology and decision making to force the confusing parts to be done anyway. It created a "realistic" (as much as you can say that) environment for a program to live in. For me the part I truly liked and still love watching is the interaction between Flynn and the Bit - it is one of the best pieces of cyberpunk moviedom out there. Of course part of that is that cyberpunk movies traditionally blow chunks.
I haven't seen the sequel yet - I fell on a patch of ice and injured my back before it came out and until I get the MRI done this Wednesday am not supposed to do that much movement. My guess is it is either the same things and will simply be a cult classic or they just raped the whole thing. It is VERY unlikely that they created something that appeals to such a strange and unforgiving market as the people who love the original Tron and those that watch movies now. Given that I'm one of the ones that liked the original I hope for a cult classic, but I figure they probably raped it.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
I think the people that saw the original Tron at the time remember it as a much better movie than it really was.
Yes. This is exactly what happened with the the Star Wars sequels*. I remember when the first of those came out, and people where all down on it because it didn't have an elaborate plot or witty dialog. Take off the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, and they're pretty similar.
This is actually a Good Thing, though. People are expecting better fare these days.
*Excepting of course Jar-Jar, the creation of said character being an unforgivable crime against nature.
But I am already confusing it with Lawnmower Man.
I guess I need to see it to disambiguate them.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I saw Tron in the theater when it came out. I was really looking forward to it. It had a gotten a lot of tech coverage, including a fairly detailed account (in Byte, IIRC) about the mainframe rendering in New York with data streams being fed back to LA. At the time, it was an enormous amount of data to be moving around.
Anyway, I wasn't disappointed by the rendering, but the storyline was stupid. I went with a friend, and we laughed through large portions of it because it was so incredibly ridiculous. I was in High School at the time. I have the 20th anniversary edition of Tron on DVD and have watched it once or twice, and I still think the storyline is ridiculous.
To me, the best thing that came out of Tron was the arcade game franchise. I shoveled a fair number of quarters into both the original game, as well as Discs of Tron (which was a really fun game).
Actually that would be quite cool...Sam Flynn takes over Encom, and he eventually thinks his crap don't stink. And furthermore he has millions of fanboys exquisitely sensitive to his Reality Distortion Field.
The Tron sequel idea I had would have had Kevin Flynn basically becoming a Bill Gates-esque zillionaire with a Jobsian fanboy following. He eventually rewrites and unleashes the MCP on the Internet cloud because he craves complete ownage. However, there is a young Eastern European hacker kid who steps up and saves the Cloud...and the world. Yeah, the young hacker would be kinda sorta based on Linus Torvalds.
However, that story was better and less hokily done as Summer Wars. When Funimation unleashes that in theatres...GO. Actually, come to think of it, Summer Wars was what Tron: Legacy should have been. And Oz is so much more visually interesting than The Grid 2.0.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Now that Tron: Legacy has made kaboodles of money, will it be long before we see a remake of Automan on TV?
Avatar had great CG, and a horrible, flat, and over used story line and plot. Fern Gully was a much better take on that story.
I rewatched FernGully on cable a few months ago. Holy crap, Avatar was a total clone of that film, minus the entertaining Robin Williams bat character.
Greedy human organization cutting down trees in order to exploit and profit from the environment's natural resources? Check.
One specific tree is the home to the indigenous life forms, while another is ancient and whose destruction is at the center of the struggle? Check.
Male protagonist human transmorphed from organization's peon into form acceptable by threatened indigenous natives? Check.
A common-sense survival action by the female lead saves the life of the still-ignorant-of-native-ways male lead? Check.
Humans use technology to assist their side in the wanton destruction of the native habitat? Check.
Female native protagonist teaches male non-native protagonist her native ways and customs? Check.
Interspecies love angle between the male and female lead characters? Check.
Female lead character is the daughter and heir apparent of the society's primary maternal spiritual figure? Check.
Maternal spiritual leader is sacrificed in the struggle and replaced by the female lead character? Check.
Background scenery includes natural rock formations in the shape of magnetic lines of flux? Check.
Protagonist learns to use leaves larger than his body for transport? Check.
Protagonist learns to tame and use native creatures to gain modes of transportation? Check.
Protagonist uses his knowledge of the weak points of the machinery to disable it while it is attempting to destroy the local environment? Check.
Evil force anthropomorphizes technology to wage their attack? Check.
Indigenous natives use mystical forces to assist their side in defeating technology? Check.
Greedy human organization defeated and driven permanently from the native landscape? Check.
Seriously, they were the same movie!
John
I do think that for you to appreciate TRON, you have to make the mental leap that there's a digital Narnia on the other side of the wardrobe^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^laser. If you can't make the leap that there's this alternate reality / world behind something that to so many seems mundane--a computer--you'll never connect with the plot.
I'm an electrical engineer with quite a bit of computer architecture experience. I'm also someone for whom computers have always held a fair bit wonder, despite that knowledge. I am acutely aware that nothing TRON-like could be going on under the hood. But, computers captured my imagination from a young age, and I think that goes a long way toward both TRON and TRON: Legacy working for me. If you look at a computer like you look at a Cuisinart--a boring, if capable tool that's a narrow means to a narrow end--then yeah, I can see how you might not connect with TRON. But, if you allow yourself the ability to imagine and dream a little, and have just a little of that child-like wonder where computers are involved, then just maybe it might work for you.
Program Intellivision!
The point of TRON:Legacy was the same as the original TRON: Wouldn't it be cool to actually BE inside the computer where you could interact in a meaningful and tactile way with computer programs (that weren't designed to have a 3D representation).
The graphics were nice, especially if you paid for the IMAX 3D experience. I thought they provided the same role as in Avatar: stun the audience into not noticing the plot.
The plot wasn't the point of TRON. The graphics, while nice, weren't the point of TRON. The idea of physically interacting with arbitrary computer programs directly was the point. It's "cool" and "neat" almost because it's impossible and ludicrous.
The first movie had one original idea and a crap script. Why, if you're making a sequel to that movie, would you throw out the idea and *keep* the crap script?
I don't think imagination has anything to do with it. I think the guys at Disney now are very different that the guys at Disney in 1980. The proof? 1980 Disney made Tron. 2010 Disney made a Tron sequel.
In the 1970s, Disney was finding it incredibly difficult to stay relevant. While everyone else was doing The French Connection and All The President's Men, Disney was doing Herbie the Love Bug.
That's how you got movies like The Black Hole and Tron and Never Cry Wolf. They knew they needed to take risks.
But 2010 Disney wants to take as few risks as possible, which is why they're recycling all those old properties. Tron was a movie, made by a bunch of artists and animators who weren't filmmakers, had never made a movie before, and proposed using TWO techniques no one had ever used before. That's...I mean, has there ever been as big a risk taken by a major studio? The fact that the movie got made *at all* is a huge vindication.
Tron Legacy was made by a couple of hired guns brought in to clean up a project that was going nowhere. It shows. It's a mess, it's uninspired, it doesn't make a lot of sense, and it completely ignores the one original idea the first movie had. But it's got lightcycles and frisbees and lots of neon and I think that's all Disney wanted.
I think the age can not decide your life attitude, the most important is that we should hold positive mind on life.
So what's *after* that to really excite us?
How about MS Windows 3D on the 800GHz Intel Quantum Processor with superconducting high speed bus, including 256TB of Spintronic RAM powered by a single 0.2VDC supercap. There's always something on the horizon to get excited about.
Reminds me of when the US Patent Office declared "everything that could have been invented has been patented." That was in the mid 1800's.
Look at Facebook and a host of Farmville-like apps and the control the apps have over users...
In what regard? These apps were authorized by the user at some point and the user may stop using them.
and I thought WoW and Evercrack were bad but they were just the tip of the iceberg as they were too complicated for the less than average user, which Facebook clearly makes up for.
Indeed. I also like the "WoW made me fat" argument. To that crowd, I know it's asking too much but how about a little personal responsibility?
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
The idea of humans going into a machine no longer new, but I thought it would have been more interesting to have programs come out into the new world, opening up the possibilities of taking human evolution into a next stage. The fact that the ISO made it out was a starting point, but if that's an intro to the sequel, then this installment was a waste of money.
as a villain he was cardboard.
He was supposed to be single minded because he was built for a purpose.
But I didn't see him as that cardboard because as we saw at the end, something he really craved was approval for the perfection he had attained.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Angsty teen makes good after everyone believes in him? Yea, awesome plot.
That was only a tiny side story to the real plot, which was all about Flynn.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think some people go into these movies like they're going to experience a religious conversion in the 3rd act, or like there's some sudoku the plot has to solve or it has "holes". Whatever! It was awesome and I'd go see it again in the theater.
What needed to be explained to my 13 yr old nephew:
I don't know about anyone else, but in 1982 I was reading Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, John Brunner, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester Del Rey, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Robert A. Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Roger Zelazny, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Larry Niven, Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffrey, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Dean R. Koontz, Ben Bova, Frank Herbert, Spider Robinson, John Varley, Gordon R. Dixon, Orson Scott Card, Joan Vinge, Brian Aldiss, and others. I didn't feel any lack of SF; quite the opposite - there was more good SF coming out than I could possibly keep up with.
By then I had seen Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Flash Gordon and Time Bandits, so I had some concept of what SF should look like on a movie screen. In my peer group, Tron did not strike us as a rallying cry for the hacker/hobbyist scene. Wargames was that movie (a year later); Tron just wasn't. It was another SF movie, not much better or worse than others of its era.
In computers, I would absolutely and categorically disagree that 1981 was "blah" for home PCs. The Sinclair ZX80 and Radio Shack Color Computer (released in late 1980) were big deals because many more people could afford them than an Apple ][ or TRS-80, and in 1981 the ZX81 and VIC-20 were released, so 1981 was really the first big year for affordable computers. The C64, when it was first released, was an upmarket, premium priced VIC-20. Even in 1982/1983 more people were still buying VIC-20s than C64s. And don't forget that the IBM PC, TI 99/4A, and (in the UK) the BBC Micro all came out in 1981.
In today's world of PCs, there has been nothing to really excite us for about 10 years. PCs are mature - they are only getting better incrementally. Where the action is today is mobile handsets. My current PC can run a flight simulator slightly better than my previous PC. My current phone can run a flight simulator at all, for the first time, unlike any other phone I've ever had. Is it useful to have a flight simulator in my phone? Not at all, but most of what we did with computers in 1982 wasn't very useful either.
After mobile handsets hit their plateau, I don't know what's next. I don't see any other devices on the horizon. There's no reason to suppose there has to be an exciting new technological device all the time. Maybe if tablets take over from and/or merge with laptops, or something.
They could make a WHOLE movie about that, did you know?
They did. It was called Tron:Evolution.
She was really the main subject, her and Flynn protecting her.
What are these things called emotions
Why would she not know about that? Obviously as a program inside the computer Users could feel them (and pain). Why not her? She was basically a program complex enough to be a User. I think we'll have a lot more detail on that in the next movie.
I expected to see more...superpowers
Actually we saw quite a bit. He repaired the arm by editing her code; We never saw another program do that. He also stopped the elevator, and of course there was the end... even being a user there's only so much you can do, and he was burdened with protecting the AI that he saw as his true legacy. That's the really interesting aspect to me, the key word is Legacy because you are meant to think of his son but really is was all about the ISO!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And with that post, you missed the point.
CG is now buttered bread. The ability for a major film company to find an art-house and have them deliver the goods is no longer the problem. That hurdle has been dealt with. What Tron:Legacy lacked, was direction, plain and simple.
When humans were on screen, and their abiltiies entered into the picture, it was just not done as well as it should have been. It's one thing to have people portray semi-numb programs, or dictators in human form. It is an entirely different scenario to have human's play human's in an imaginary digital world, and actually carry the human aspect that a film with heavy CG, requires. Again, this goes back to direction, pure and simple.
I have no doubt that with as thin as the plot was, the direction and prose of the actors, where required, should have been portrayed better. I'm not saying the acting was bad, there wer portions of the film where the acting was spot on, but, there were points where the portrayal of human emotion should have shined, and it was left flat, stoic, and I guess appropriately "digital", whatever the hell that means.
My point to all this is as follows: this film had a budget towards the $200M mark. $200 MILLION! (haven't checked exact numbers, nor do I care to...). Either way, with THAT kind of funding, I expect to be blown out of the park. I expect that every second of film that makes it to my eyes in full blissful 3D, and 2D when portioned, to both dazzle me, and continue the film each moment to the next. The one person to make that happen, from start to finish, is the director. I don't know if it was the lack of vision, lack of coherency during final editing, or lack of focus during filming, but I expected this film make me wanting more, and more.
Perhaps it's my mistake for thinking Hollywood can still dazzle me. To still make something truely 21st century. To make the audience come away from their seats asking more questions than that movie gave, yet deliver a story that anyone can follow. And with regard to CG, have the audience thinking THAT should be the new standard that which all CG should now be compared to, and one-uped.
Despite T:L being a pseudo-sequel of sorts, it had the oppurtunity to be the go-to front-runner for what is now the new movie standard:3D. Sorry, but Avatar wasn't it. Avatar was Dances with Wolves on an alien planet. T:L had a backstory that, with our current state of technology, and large time-lapse in between, offered up the studio with an oppurtunity to intregate a film about being digital, within our physical world. And what we're given is a mediocre high-def CG fest that falls short of what it could, no.... SHOULD have been.
It's been said before, but I'll say it again: Hollywood is out of ideas. And as an art form, or force, which it once was, no longer exists.
Expectations? Why bother anymore. It seems mediocrity is mainstream in an industry that has too much money, yet complains that it doesn't make enough.
I think most people who have a poor impression of the movie came into it with their own ideas and failed to just watch it and enjoy it for what it was/is...a pretty cool show about being inside the computer world. Watching it with my five year old made me feel the same excitement I felt seeing the original Tron in the theaters when I was a boy.
Tron: Legacy was for me a very entertaining movie; I put aside my disbelief and jumped into the grid and enjoyed every minute of it. I watched it like I was five years old.
The original TRON was lame. Lame CGI. Lame story.
In the 80s, users used command line, vi, and terminals
Now, users get put in a box for their own good with Java, Apple, and Windows. The programs have gotten smarter and more powerful, the users have not.
they felt the story was 'unimaginative' or 'run-of-the-mill.' Also, many people born later, such as my younger sister, who is very tech savvy herself, seemed to dismiss the plot and characters completely, instead speaking only of the quality of the graphics and the music. I believe this speaks to how the human race has grown out of its own imagination when it comes to technology since it entered the digital age. Young people can't see past the fact that there isn't a world inside the computer, that programs are just tools to be used by humans, and artificial intelligence is something discussed on a daily basis.
I felt exactly the same way about the original Tron, which I saw when it first came out. I'd been working with computers for a few years at that point. (Frankly I was annoyed at their use of "MCP" -- which was the actual name of the Burroughs Large Systems (eg B6700) OS -- as the bad guy.)
I'm an old fart, and I "can't see past the fact that there isn't a world inside the computer" either, because I know there isn't. It's an interesting abstraction, and handled well it can make for great stories (like Vinge's "True Names" and some of the better cyberpunk that followed it), but the "sensawunda" isn't there for anyone who knows how the things work -- just as space-oriented sci-fi lost much of its sensawunda when Apollo missions started to make walking on the Moon look routine, and Mariner and Viking showed Mars to be a lot deader than we'd hoped.
It's easier to make up -- and to believe -- stories about things that are unknown, like far-off lands a couple of centuries ago, the solar system sixty years ago, or computers (for most people) thirty years ago, than it is to make up believable stories about that which is so well-known as to be mundane. (Fantasy stories -- including urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and the likes of Star Wars -- covenant with the reader/viewer to suspend disbelief going into it. It's a "we both know this couldn't happen, but let's pretend" vs the harder-SF "what if this could happen" covenant.)
It's not an age thing, it's a knowledge thing. It also has nothing to do with a lack of imagination: I am (among other things) a professional science fiction & fantasy writer; I get paid to imagine things.
-- Alastair
Reminds me of when the US Patent Office declared "everything that could have been invented has been patented." That was in the mid 1800's.
You know, it occurs to me that given the amount of bad patents we've been seeing, maybe the above misquoting of commissioner Charles H. Duell's supposed statement "everything that can be invented has been invented" (which is most likely itself a misquote) is more true than most people might like to admit. Though it was supposed to have been stated in 1899, not the mid 1800s. See here for some interesting reading on this quote.
Apologize for my scattered / rambling / thoughts in advance...working 25/8 does that. There's a lack of appreciation or rather "awe" with todays generation in regard to semi-pre-mainstream technology..shows such as Tron, VideoDrome, Star Wars, Trek, org Who series, Twilight Zone, Last Star Fighter, anyone born around the mid 70's - early 80's can fill in the rest. Even older reviewers that rated this Tron rehash negative apply to the following observation. When I was young, I couldn't wait until the day/future came that I could own a tricorder...that day has come and gone, I throw them away without hesitation today (mobile devices). The idea of holographic images far fetched then, owning Hal a reality and common place today, Max is idle in the other room, which I just woke up via voice command from the couch. I can track friends via GPS, reach them in near real-time..no more phone tag, tape based answering machines or having to plan the weekend with friends before the bell rang on Friday....there wasn't any real "msg me" or update your places status and I/We'll catch up with you..no planning ahead resulted in a weekend at home. However, fighter pilots could communicate between planets / universities with ease. The idea that TV could control your brain or news media creating facts-from-lies was spooky yet, interesting...much of the headroom universe is present today. Being able to compile code or hack mainframes in seconds was an unreal thought..left for the big screen and to witness all these things, required leaving the house and siting in a room with other humans...not a glass of wine and boxee or mythtv. Movies were once projected on to objects..not the other way around (3D TV). Most remakes or re-released sci-classics require a certain level of "awe" to be enjoyed.....the imagination of yesterday is todays boredom or obsoleted/rev'd quickly. I admit technology has spoiled me some but I can still appropriate a time in my life when it was a future goal to own an 286 an 80MB HDD was a wet dream..being able to beam data from one point to another wireless WOW or a cordless phone that could be used more than 100ft from its base. ..anyway, my scattered point is: older genre based shows are boring....to most of us now. CGI matters more than actual imagination and desire to live long enough to see Jetsons tech. So its okay for the story line in Tron to suck today.....it was never really about the plot..more how far can we bend the mind...the visual concept of giving code human like form was epic for its time, today it actually a reality ( AI/NanoBots ) . Today we take for granted the technology we have.........back then it was a dream of some future and far off time. Today.....COMpuER submit post!
-- Best regards
Is the film going to make only profits that look like binary numbers? I still remember watching the original film as a kid. It was amazing. I also thought War Games was amazing, but I saw a sequel to that recently and groaned.
Pro Coffee Drinker
I saw it about a week ago. Overall, my biggest impression was one of missed potential.
(Note, here I'm talking primarily about the story and the world-building, not about the cinematography.)
The overall structure was a weakness from the start. Sam Flynn turns out to be yet another Prince Harry character: the heir to the throne who goofs around and avoids his inherited position until he's handed a confrontation that forces him to prove himself, at which point he rises to the occasion as a True Prince. We've seen this before; it's the usual aristocratic nonsense: worth is not achieved, but inherited and then revealed.
Contrast the original: Kevin Flynn was an honest working hacker who was forced to go rogue when he was screwed over by a yuppie coworker. Kevin's triumph was to prove himself as a creator. He set out with the aim of showing that he and not Ed Dillinger was the author of Space Paranoids; and in the end, he accomplished that goal, but in a way that -- through his creative "User power" -- changed the Programs' world for the better.
Sam isn't a creator. He sets out with no particular goals of his own; he is handed all his goals by his inheritance. Kevin Flynn was a creative adult seeking justice; Sam Flynn is an irresponsible rich boy growing up. And that's a story that's been played out far too many times.
One of Legacy's few big world-building ideas is the emergence of the Isos: Programs evolved from the System itself, rather than being created in the image of a User. This could have been huge. But instead it is presented merely to give Sam's love interest a tragic backstory. The war is over; the Isos lost, here's the last surviving princess of a dead race. Give her a hug. ... and nobody even bothers to say, "Sam, you dickhead, if you'd logged in yesterday, you could have stopped the fucking Holocaust."
The political vision of the System in Tron is more complex. There are old powers in the System that defy the MCP's regime at personal risk to themselves: Dumont at the I/O Tower. The MCP's assimilation of the whole System into itself is not complete; it can be resisted. In Legacy, CLU's genocide of the Isos is over and done with
Another new world-building idea is the possibility that a Program could use the laser terminal to escape into the real world: that the laser wasn't limited to objects that originated in the real world (oranges or Kevin Flynns), but could also play back a Program into human form. Thus Quorra's escape; thus CLU's threat to invade our world with armies of Programs.
Well, Tron's MCP didn't need armies to take over the world. The MCP could just hack the Pentagon. In Tron, the deep entanglement of the real world and the System is made clear: the MCP can threaten Dillinger not with armies materializing in ENCOM's laser bay, but with the legal and political forces native to our world.
Ironically enough, the 1982 vision has more in common with today's Internet-enabled reality than the 2010 version. As far as we know, the System in Legacy isn't even on the Net: it's a dusty minicomputer sitting in the basement of Flynn's Arcade with barely enough connectivity to reach Alan Bradley's pager.
Ultimately, CLU is much less of a real-world threat than the MCP. The MCP had taken over the System that ENCOM used to do its business, and was extending tentacles into banks, major governments, and who knows what else. CLU's domain is that one minicomputer; the big threat would be shut off if Alan or Sam had just unplugged the laser terminal.
Both of the above two problems point at a bigger problem with Legacy: it ultimately doesn't take Programs and the System seriously as an independent sort of intelligent existence rather than a mere imitation of our wor
... clearly not written by a Pink Floyd fan.
oooh
oooh
oooh
I see a new Synchronicity in the near future.
Time to oil the kickstand and change the fluids on Ol' Hickory.
not offtopic. need i explain?
-1 unfunny.
Hmmm........ Atom Heart Mother was in the news recently. I'll start there.
In case you're thick: Author of malarkey in question needs Dr. Floyd, stat! And, maybe, a house-call from Dr. Leary.
The rest uh you'se need a visit from Dr. Vinnie Boombatz.
Glaven!
Oooh, a binary number. How geeky/nerdy. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
After the first movie, I remember interesting discussions about the religious analogy, in addition to being totally entertained in the watching. Same with the new one, a good time at the movies, and interesting stimulating conversations afterwards relating to the relationship between the creator and the imperfect sentient creation. Now that is a good movie in my book.
CG not saving a bad movie anymore? I assume you haven't heard of Avatar.
I read a lot of those authors you mentioned within the last two years and I cannot get enough of them. I saw so many authors I liked there that you've given me some reading to do!
I think technology is growing only horizontally: its just isolated islands. Everyone thinks they have to introduce something something separate to be useful or game changing. They don't, they have to merge the ideas we already have into one and integrate them.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Disney tried to basically do the same thing with this movie, relying heavily on special effects. Unfortunately for them, and hopefully fortunately for the future of movie making, the movie-watching public may finally be getting to the point where cutting-edge technology is not enough to save bad movies.
Perhaps you didn't watch Avatar and you're not familiar with its worldwide box office success?
Unfortunately, you're wrong. Avatar's plot is much dumber than Tron's, yet the oh-so-amazing CGI and the 3D buzz it showcased made more than a billion dollars in profit. James Cameron wins.
People expecting an action film want to watch flashy stuff moving on the screen and won't care too much about the story. The truth is that the Tron movies just weren't flashy or catchy enough for the critics or the intended audience.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
Except the world of Tron Legacy was running on a computer from 1989. From what was shown in the film, it wasn't much more than a powerful workstation and definitely not anywhere near a supercomputer of the time. Not taking into account the enormous amount of 100MB hard drives that could last twenty years it would have needed, figure a couple of 32-bit CPUs running at less than 50MHz and 8MB of RAM, at best. Our current mobile phones are many times more powerful than the computer Flynn had and we aren't close to having photorealistic graphics with multiple sentient AIs running on them.
At least in the original Tron, the ENCOM mainframe was fairly ambiguous. We saw rooms full of computer equipment that might more believably be able to produce what we saw in the computer world. In Tron Legacy, the world running inside of the computer we saw was an anachronism.
You can fix them by thinking about what comes next.
Fern Gully: They defeated a single logging machine. Thousands more will come. Zack will bring his message to the world about the need to preserve nature, but we already have people saying that, and the deforestation continues anyway.
Avatar: The planet is worth unimaginable amounts of money. More will come. The natives got soundly defeated in combat by the security detail of a mineing company - next time it'll be a real military, with orbital bombardment weapons, real bombs, and enough nukes to sterilise a continent.
It was an excellent adventure movie! The common theme with people that didn't like it is that they're trying to read something into it, like it's some great piece of literature or something. Get over it, it's not. It's a movie. It's there to entertain you, let it do it's job and you'll really enjoy it!
I think the only part that I got interested in was Quorra becoming human. They could make a WHOLE movie about that, did you know? What does it mean to be human? Why is pain so awful? What are these things called emotions? Et cetera.
They already have, several times.. it's called pinocchio.
Again you just come back to the technology. When Tron came out, general-purpose computers couldn't do the things they were doing, you couldn't just punch that stuff up on a mainframe. The machines used for the graphics were custom hardware designed just for graphics. Today, we yawn at the graphics of the sequel because your home game console can produce results which look just as good, albeit at a lower resolution and frame rate. Every time I see another funny animal movie come out I wince because many of them indeed make video games look good. I suspect that is their point; they advertise the video game. This is an entirely logical thing to do since video games make more money than movies now in the aggregate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think the people that saw the original Tron at the time remember it as a much better movie than it really was.
Nah. I saw the original TRON at the time... And I own it, so I've watched it several times over the years. It isn't an amazing movie.
The plot is a little weird. The acting isn't amazing. The pacing is slow and awkward. The main reason to go see it was the special effects. It was the first movie I saw with computer generated effects. It was absolutely amazing at the time. And, while I still like it, the effects haven't aged that well.
While we all decry that sort of thing as laziness and lack of imagination these days, when we think back to that original movie we think of how cool it looked to us at the time, and gloss over the bad parts (like the plot and the pacing). The only imagination required to appreciate the new Tron is the imagination it takes to believe your nostalgic view of the original is an accurate measure of the quality of the film.
When TRON originally came out, computers were mysterious.
We'd just purchased some kind of EPSON machine for my mother, who was a teacher and used it for word processing. It has BASIC on it and ran some form of DOS. I spent hours upon hours just messing around with simple programs... Making it spam my name across the screen and things like that. It seemed like magic. And that computer was incredibly limited... There was a sense that if you could just crank these things to 11, you could do anything.
That's what TRON tied in to. The mystery and magic surrounding computers.
Folks were finally starting to see computers in the classroom and at home... And they seemed to be far beyond human comprehension. You had to learn obscure commands to make them do anything... And they'd do strange things that you didn't intend... But, if you knew what you were doing, you could make them dance.
Look at other movies of the time - Wargames and DARYL, for example. Folks really thought their home computers would be talking and thinking for themselves before too long. That human-like AI was just around the corner. Nobody knew any better.
And while nobody honestly believed that your programs were wandering around on the grid having conversations with each-other... It didn't seem quite so impossible.
These days that mystery and magic are just plain gone. And the idea that programs are fully sentient and having conversations with each-other inside your computer is simply ridiculous.
Disney tried to basically do the same thing with this movie, relying heavily on special effects.
Maybe I watch too much sci-fi crap to know what heavy special effects are... Maybe I've become desensitized... But the effects in TRON: Legacy didn't seem that heavy to me.
I mean, obviously, you've got the 3D thing going on... And it's taking place inside a computer, so much of the landscape is virtual... And everybody is glowing...
But, compared to something like Avatar? Or any of the Pixar stuff? Or even something like Sky Captain?
The effects in TRON: Legacy seem rather restrained and tasteful to me... Omnipresent, of course... Which can't be avoided, considering the setting... But restrained and tasteful none the less.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I think the people that saw the original Tron at the time remember it as a much better movie than it really was. You're spot on when you say the original Tron heavily relied on special effects at the expense of story. While we all decry that sort of thing as laziness and lack of imagination these days, when we think back to that original movie we think of how cool it looked to us at the time, and gloss over the bad parts (like the plot and the pacing). The only imagination required to appreciate the new Tron is the imagination it takes to believe your nostalgic view of the original is an accurate measure of the quality of the film.
I've never understood why they don't just pay someone to write a good script when they make a movie. I can understand that there would sometimes be process failures when the best efforts of everyone involved yields a shitty product. I can understand when a studio comes out and says "Yeah, we're going to make a McDonalds film, loaded with titty and splosions and shit that tastes good but aren't good for you." Transformers is a formula that works. But if you're actually trying to make a good movie, why not start from a good script? I'm not going to make a steakhouse-quality dinner using stew beef, I need to drop some coin on good ingredients.
You'd think that the script would be the cheapest part of the whole movie. There are tons of starving writers out there with absolutely brilliant ideas. Why are they ignored? It just doesn't make any sense.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I don't get this line of reasoning. People say, the original sucked. Ergo, I will excuse the new movie for sucking and say the new movie was good. This happens with all Sci-Fi remakes now. Like Transformers- well the TV show was awful, so I really enjoyed the new movie which was also awful. Why does that make sense? Crap is crap. If you didn't like TRON, and you found the new movie to commit all the same errors, you don't like the new movie. End of line.
There's a graphic novel titled "Tron: Betrayal" that helps bridge the gap between the two films. I read it before I saw Tron Legacy; I think it helped me enjoy the movie a lot more.
The graphic novel goes into more depth about Flynn being split between his responsibilities in the real world and in the computer world, his creation of Clu to help him achieve a perfect society in the computer world, and Clu's frustration at Flynn's increasing absence. Eventually Clu decides to take a more active role in realizing the perfection he believes Flynn wants. This makes him more of a sympathetic villain; instead of just being a generic "bad guy", he is genuinely trying to do what he sees as right and he resents Flynn for having a problem with it.
The graphic novel also goes into more of an explanation of the "Isos". In the novel they're interesting; I felt disappointed that the movie does away with them quickly and plays the whole "last of your kind" card.
Ten bucks from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Tron-Betrayal-Jai-Nitz/dp/142313463X
The TRON fantasy worked in 1980 because computers for most of us were these magical black boxes. Compared to today, a really small group of people around the world understood how they worked or how to program them.
Today, our fantasies have grown with our understanding of their ever increasing power... enter The Matrix.
Tron 2010 needed to evolve but it didn't. This has nothing to do with _OUR_ lack of imagination, it has to do with the films own lack of imagination.
is what i'm trying to say...
I saw Tron Legacy over the weekend and the plot had a lot of interesting little avenues that were just dead ends. The son of Dillinger does...nothing. Tron shows up for 5 minutes and does...basically nothing. They bring a program from the machine world into the human world and they do...nothing. If you want a good read from a great author that really expounds on a lot of interesting ideas predating the Matrix, Tron Legacy, and others, check out Roger Zelazny and Jane Linskold's Donnerjack. It does a great job of exploring the ideas of humans going into a virutal computer world, bringing a program back into the real world, having a child with that program and then the child being able to cross back and forth physically between worlds. As a bonus, the virtual gods are trying to take over the real world and Death gets cheated a couple of times. Lots of fun and a neat look at something that had to have influenced a lot of the writers making these flicks.
so some kid got sucked into the new coin-console commisioned by flints company, but /no i haven't seen the movie yet ...
assembled with bad parts from north korea, so flint and co. need to rescue the kid from
the cyberspace?
So I enjoyed Tron legacy but... there were a couple of problems in my opinion.
It suffered for better technology rather than using the technology to tell a story they got sucked into we can so we should. in particular the whole cityscape inside the computer with neon was a tad cyber punk rather than being a otherworldly reflection of inside the system as the original tron was.
Also the whole thing with the one remaining ISO was very Weird Science ie Inside the computer is a super hot smart chick if you could just get off your ass to go rescue her.
Also When they break out of the grid there's this wasteland with no energy no light nada in the original tron regardless of where they go there's energy around.
The house was also a big problem the idea that Flynn just gives up and goes all zen master is totally whack imho.
The technology, open source bits and corporate back-story is a red herring nobody seems to be able to see past. Watching it I couldn't help but notice it's chock full of religious commentary (mostly Christian but sprinkled with some Buddhist and miscellaneous other Eastern philosophies). I’m not religious by any stretch, but I found the movie deeply satisfying when viewed this way.
***Warning Spoilers***
This analysis is very preliminary, I’ve only seen the movie once, but I think it’s fairly sound.
In the movie Kevin Flynn represents the Christian God the Father, the creator of all things, all powerful, all knowing (supposedly) etc. etc.
Tron represents the Christian Holy Spirit, the kinetic 'action' arm of God (or perhaps more likely an Archangel like Michael or some synthesis).
CLU then, I thought originally, represented Jesus, but may also represent the Christian God's other creation, Lucifer (or perhaps both simultaneously).
(I'll get to Sam Flynn in a minute).
Where the story plays with the allegory (and quite cleverly I think) is in the twist it takes on the traditional Judeo-Christian story of God the father, omniscient and omnipotent. In the story Flynn sets out to create a new world with his holy trinity, and while he thinks he's creating something fantastic, all he ends up doing is creating conditions ripe for a new life-form that, emerge from the wilderness. This is commentary that perhaps mankind was no the direct creation of God, but an emergent behavior of a complex universe that God couldn't understand. From there, it uses this principle to define the rest of the story.
CLU, tasked with creating perfection turns against his master to eradicate this new life-form and leave Flynn a powerless and mere observer of the going ons in his creation. With the power of destruction and the ability to repurpose programs, CLU tries to build an army of true believers to take into the real world and conquer it. Considering the Christian Story of the apocalypse, the story is not about world domination in the 007 sense, it's about Satan's gathering of an army, turned by temptation and corruption (which has meaning in both the digital and religious worlds), into an assault on Heaven itself! Here Heaven is the real world (as represented by the portal high in the clouds). Except in Tron, Heaven is deeply flawed and not the world of perfection described in Christianity.
The allegory extends further if you consider the common concept in many Christian faiths that God must leave the world alone for mankind to exercise free-will. The story hints at this, that the programs have a kind of free-will, there are programs that resist CLU and ones that seek to serve him. Even the turned army is given an inspirational speech to keep them along CLUs path...implying that they need encouragement to stay on his side.
Where the commentary gets some spice is in the elements of Buddhism and Eastern philosophies that are brought in. Left as an observer, Flynn fights the compelling need to interfere in his world by seeking a Buddhist-type detachment. It finds him deep in meditation, a Guru to Quorra (who represents a particular naive and warlike humanity in the movie BTW)...on the edge of Enlightenment -- advising non-action. To further add to this, he's meditating high in a mountain, far from "civilization" in his quest for detached enlightenment, just as Buddhists today will head to the mountains to meditate and focus on their detachment. His house is a representation of the things he has not yet detached from...most things are pale imitations of things in the real world, the furniture is white and featureless, but implies a rich elegance (temptation towards attachment), but the furnishings are rather spartan in a way. Yet two notable things are virtually exact mimics of things that Flynn cannot yet give up (representing how far he has to go to yet achieve enlightenment), food (sustenance) and books (knowledge). These things are rendered in exacting detail, down to dusty b
It would have been awesome to see a program enter a user interaction portal, toss its disk in the air and berate it's user for not harvesting crops.
I am a bit surprised that people seem to be missing the religious overtones of both movies. I think both movies are a bit deeper than most people seem to realize. In fact, Zen philosophy was used to guide the second film. Perhaps the most obvious "religious" scene being in the original movie where TRON makes a comment to Flynn about users always having a plan (as if users were Gods or something). Flynn laughs in response and attempts to dispel that notion. In the second movie, it seemed more subtle, as Flynn takes on this role as the creator (god) of the computer world. [spoiler] At some point, the miracle happens and you now have a computer program that is able to come out into the real world, allowing the two worlds to cross-over and allowing for amazing new possibilities. [/spoiler] The film should raise questions about your beliefs and about possibilities for the future.
...and as such, even the very best and most exhaustively thorough programmer will never have the foresight to include tests, checks, and controlling logic to deal with all possible inputs the software might ever encounter. Therefore, the way CLU twisted off onto his own power trip might very well simply be the kind of unpredictable results you can get with any kind of software buggyness or logic design flaws that the programmer failed to account for.
HISHE just put up their Music Video tribute to the original. The most difficult production they've done yet. A sound endorsement and a work that would make Daft Punk proud http://www.howitshouldhaveended.com/videos
Let me first describe myself.
I was 10 in 1977 & saw the first Star Wars more than 50 times, back when that stat meant something (ie in theaters, before anyone had a VCR).
I first learned to use computers on an ancient MECC terminal, playing Oregon Trail and keeping the 20'+ roll of output paper to re-read all the cool stuff that happened. Would spend days at my friends' houses playing on their Ataris or Apple computers because their parents were cool (mine got me a Colecovision...sigh)
I'd easily drop $20 (a *LOT* of cash in 1980) on an afternoon in an arcade, generate absolutely no Vitamin D, and consider it time and money very well-spent.
I was the absolute perfect target for Tron in 1982.
I liked the movie, but even as a 15 year old I didn't think it was all THAT.
Cool graphics (I liked the Recognizers, Bit, and the tank the best) but the plot even then was pretty stupid. I liked the lightcycles (that part of the video game being the best thing to come out of the film) but even that was only an incremental gameplay improvement on the Snake Byte video game which we were playing IIRC before the movie was released.
I just don't understand the retro-worship this movie has apparently gained in hindsight. It wasn't that big a deal at the time generally, nor even across my narrow communities of gamers, computer user's groups (remember them?), or video game geeks. Yet all I hear today is about how awesome it was. To whom?
-Puzzled.
-Styopa
Avatar's plot wasn't dumb. It was simple. There's a vast difference between the two.
Avatar deliberately used a simple, nearly archetypal plot that would have been at home in a pulp novel from the twenties, and presented it with consummate craftsmanship.
Except, by all indications, Tron Legacy has been a financial success for Disney.
There goes your theory.
Come to think about it Sam seems a bit like the young Steve Jobs. He is orphaned, a bit of a smart arse, rich....
I actually thought *Kevin* Flynn/CLU was the character based on Steve Jobs - the very smart, but iron-fisted control freak on an impossible quest for perfection by any means necessary.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Avatar's plot wasn't dumb. It was simple. There's a vast difference between the two. Avatar deliberately used a simple, nearly archetypal plot that would have been at home in a pulp novel from the twenties, and presented it with consummate craftsmanship
Ah, designing Na'vi surrogates for human brains, but not designing Na'vi smallpox is dumb, not simple. Using powered armor instead of poison gas is dumb, not simple. Fighting on the ground instead of orbital bombardment is dumb, not simple.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Read more SciFi. There's still a lot to do, technologically feasible. The hardware exists (crudely) right now; we just haven't gotten around to writing the code yet.
Take another look at cellphones. Notice how powerful they all are, while how they also all completely and utterly suck? Ten years ago, would you have guessed that in 2010 people would be using anything as shitty as IOS or Android?
The thing to do after Android 4.1 and iPhone 6, is throw away their software stacks, replacing them with what we use on desktops, and then start to build on it for the "wearable" revolution.
I was 7 when the original Tron movie came out. I was at the time your average kid with a home (TI-99-4A) computer. I read Byte magazine; I programmed a little basic. I was in short exactly the sort of nerd for whom Tron was supposedly created. All of the premises of Tron then were laughable, the plot was trite and boring, and even the graphics weren't anything to write home about (because the technology WAS too new). It was so completely out of the bounds of anything possible (and it was making false and stupid statements about things which we DID know about), that even as a seven year old, I couldn't enjoy the movie. I don't know who actually liked tron. I think maybe it was the gamer/stoner crowd more than the geek/nerd crowd. In any case given the above description of the first movie, I can say that the second movie definitely fully lived up to the first.
I beg to differ. Kids today still have little understanding of what goes on inside computers. What they now have is some form of an understanding of the use of them and equate that to "knowing computers". They will get defensive if it is implied they don't know how to use a computer(phone, iPod, etc).
30 years ago, most people heard of computers, a few worked on them doing data I/O, and fewer knew what went on inside them. It was no more magical than today but without the familiarity with them, imagination filled in and they could be presented as mystic and magical. I don't think it has to do with the current power of computers today but the fact that there are computers everywhere today. Unfortunately, there is still the complete lack of understanding of what goes on inside a computer.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Well, I for one rather liked it. After 20-odd years it was exactly what I expected from a sequel to Tron.
For the sake of record, let me tell you where I stand on this whole thing. I was born in 1973, so while I was certainly old enough to remember Tron in the movies on first run, I can't actually remember seeing it at the theatre. I know I did because I remember going INTO the theatre, but don't actually remember watching the movie. I have similar experiences of The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars (point of trivia; I saw all three at the old Odeon in Brighton, England). However, I do remember talking about Tron with my dad and brother after seeing it, and I remember liking it as an adventure movie and that's it. I don't remember ever getting any deeper meaning from it than that, and other than some rather chintzy toys they released and remembering some bits of the marketing for the movie it didn't make a truly significant impact on my life and I just moved on with whatever else was cool at the time.
So, a few years later I get to see it again on VHS, and this time I get more of it. There's a lot more of Tron in subtext than is actually spelled out on-screen. The whole thing about religion is one of the more obvious but is never exactly spelled out for the viewer. Instead it is left as an exercise to the viewer to think about things beyond the movie theatre. I like movies like that, and I believe that's why Tron gained such a following in the successive years. It also didn't hurt that I was significantly more into computers than my peers, and thus although I found the imagery of the inside of the computer amusing and naive, I also got that it was a lovely way to think about how a computer worked. However, I can't remember the effects blowing me away as a child, and they certainly didn't by the time I was a teenager seeing it again and getting the story a bit better. Still, it became a favourite of mine because it was a fun movie with a little bit of depth but it was by no means a piece of literature or art; it was pop psychology and psuedo religion wrapped in a pretty and enjoyable package.
So what do I think of Tron:Legacy as an adult? I enjoyed it. It was another fun romp through the world of the computer, upgraded and updated in such a way that it distinctly distances itself from the look of Tron while also honouring it. It continues with very similar themes while adding a more "late 80's Zen Philosophy" thing that I remember from my teens and is very much in keeping with the character of Flynn as he would have grown during those years of the late 80's. The story itself was rather linear and there WAS an awful lot of exposition... but I liked it. The exposition alone fleshed out the world very nicely and added some layers to the movie that aren't there otherwise. The ISOs were a bit of a left turn though; they were briefly mentioned and made to be the messiah... then it's like the writers didn't know where to take them. As a result, the "last of its kind" ISO... well the ISOs seem to exist solely to set that character apart from the other programs but with no hint as to WHY. That's a story that I feel could have been fleshed out a lot... maybe in the sequel.
As a result of the linearity the "big reveal" in the third act really wasn't; it was telegraphed reasonably early on if you were paying close enough attention. However, it WAS nice and I definitely don't feel that it was a bad reveal. In general though the movie was a nice romp, enjoyable to me as a late-coming fan of the original, and no more a work of art or literature than it's predecessor. I feel a lot of stuff was set up though to feed into a sequel, and there are a couple of threads I'd like to see continued. So let's hope they can continue down this road and make it... at least I do. There's still plenty of stuff in subtext in Tron:Legacy that's not explicitly spelled out on-screen... and there's enough there that it made for an entertaining discussion with my son after the movie about some of the deeper aspects behind it.
there was a Saturday morning "cartoon" called Reboot back before Toy Story was released and it was a computer rendered "cartoon". The setting was inside a Mainframe computer and the characters were computer elements with lots of computer jargon. So I wonder what those children who watched this and had the slightest understanding of the plot/setting thought of Tron.
Anyone who never used their imagination about a world inside of a computer would probably not get todays Tron.
Reboot was fantastic to watch as an adult too. There was lots of funny computer references and fun characters. Loved it when Dot Matrix got zapped by a magnet and Phong said all she needed was some Slow Food and they got that at the 8 Bit Diner.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Someone earlier here pointed out what he/she thought was ridiculous. The fact that the Recognizers burned "simulated" rocket fuel, threw up dust clouds when they landed, etc. His/her objections was why would a computer program/simulation need to burn fuel and throw up dust clouds?
What I got from T:L is that CLU was TRYING to emulate the "real world" because he wanted to be a "real person". As to the question of how a computer program (CLU/Flynn) even knew about dust clouds (for example) I think it was clear that CLU had access to a lot of digital information (pictures/videos/text) that allowed him to "see" how the outside/real world functioned, and he emulated it (all while trying to perfect it).
Yes, I saw the original TRON in theaters, I'm 44. TRON, War Games and Sneakers were 3 of the movie influences that made me pursue a career in computers/programming.
Hell, I even have an original TRON arcade machine. Want to see it? Look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX-4BG6z9ao
Frog
It was just so overbearingly beaten head-first into the ground for two hours non-stop and was already dealt with more depth and subtlety in the original that the lack of imagination was glaringly in the writing. The slightly disturbing difference is that in the original, it was the perfection of uniformity and control that was portrayed as not just evil, but a fraud that ultimately failed at the hands of the creative outlier. "Legacy" takes that outlier and has him self-immolate to end his delusions of utopia -- which if you recall from the original, was simply freedom of expression in general -- "you're ruining my zen thing, maaaaan" and his progeny simply wander off to let the corporate board do their jobs so they can happily live off their dividends without bothering to do, well, anything.
The fact the the writing just plain sucked regardless of the message and its implications vis. the original deserves a right drubbing. The fact that the message of Legacy is an absolutely toxic perversion of the original that can basically be summed up as "stupid hippie, shut up about all this peace love and freedom crap, cash your checks, go screw in the woods and leave us alone to rule the world" is actually rather chilling.
IT's clearly written by someone who decided to hate it before walking into the theater.
His reasoning is bad, he takes things way out of context, and in some parts what he says about the movie is factually wrong.
The most glaring issue with he review is that he overlooks the fact that everything had been rebuilt and changed. CLU had spent years specifically changing the system is the users have less control.
There are problems with the movie, he even touches on one of them. But the reviews reasoning is HORRID.
He also missed some vital aspects in the movie.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No, the "noob" was a puss. Flynn(presumably root) showed great real time abilities beyond those exhibited by other programs. Admittedly, he had to use the silly "Generic martial arts 4 point stanse[hand, foot, toes, knee]" to achieve this.
I escaped the hustle and bustle of christmas shoppers and got wowed by eye-candy. What more would I want?
You could want a film that changes the way you think about your life, about human nature, about reality itself.
The experience of the original TRON, at the time, sparked the imagination of many.
With the modern state of computer graphics and the ubiquity of computing devices today, it wasn't possible for a sequel to have the same impact, but it could have used the grid as a setting to tell a unique story that offered some substantial insight into the perils of playing god, but instead it was just a popcorn flick.
I'm not mad. Just disappointed.
PS: Quorra is mai waifu!
"Science Fiction is a Fictitious story based on known Scientific Principles at the time it is published"
That, my friend, is called fiction.
"A Scifi story is allowed 2 major breaches (warp drive, teleporters) of the know laws of science as long as at least one of them has some sort of sketchy device that supposedly mitigates the law (heisenberg compensators.)"
So now you are creating your OWN arbitrary definition of what sci-fi is in order to prop up you non existent argument.
"The only breaches of Scientific law allowed are ones that are thoroughly explained in such a way that even a physicist would say "Well... ok, maybe..." Warpdrive is definitely out of the picture unless the story takes place in another physical universe."
Bring that warp drive isn't 'impossible, this is just another personal arbitrary definition. Useless.
Even by your OWN arbitrary definition Tron qualifies as Sci-Fi: Transporters, and a uniquely built electronic computer system. BAM .
Yo have created a person box for the sole purpose of poo-pooing anything that doesn't allready exist in your limited experiences.
Shame on you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I took my 14 year old with me to this movie and we both really enjoyed it. But, I know that, in time he will only remember the awesome effects and near perfectly synced movie score. Those are the seeds that will fuel his imagination (nostalgia) and not the forgettable story line.
Imagination works the best when we have to fill in the rest of story for ourselves.
Trouble rather the tiger than the sage for to you kingdoms and their armies are mighty, but to him they are but toys.
I'm not going to make a steakhouse-quality dinner using stew beef, I need to drop some coin on good ingredients.
Just as stew beef would make a lousy steak dinner, most quality steaks would make for lousy stew because they lack connective tissue to dissolve into "lip smackin gelatin". And the best ingredients poorly prepared will still come out poorly, whereas good technique can raise cheap ingredients to gourmet fair. Not all movies need to be works of art, sometimes well paced fun is all it takes
But yeah, Transformers 2 sucks on all levels...
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
It was the first movie I saw with computer generated effects.
You missed earlier movies like the psychedelic wormhole sequence in 2001 - A Space Odyssey (done in 1968!) and he CGI overlays in Future World (1976)?
There's also the famous "Genesis" CGI sequence in The Wrath of Khan, which came out just before Tron, which leads me to guessclude that you might have been too young to see the PG-rated Star Trek flick, i.e. probably born in the mid-70s?
Anyhow, TRON was far from the first -- it was first at exploiting the "halo" effect of high contrast graphics on high-persistence monitors, in bringing it to the big screen. People were familiar with the effect, but not enough to place it. So it triggered the "vaguely familiar" effect, and drew the attention of moviegoers as a result.
(A good example of the "halo" effect was seen in original Asteroids arcade consoles.)
Having worked at Interdata I got a first hand view of the first Tron. Interdata computers were used for the graphics. I would definitely say that if you didn't see the first Tron then you might well have difficulty understanding the second.
As is usual, I still think the first Tron is the best.
Two words: Bread and Circus.
As long as you give the plebs shallow entertainment with a high wow factor, they'll buy tickets. Even more so if you can fire up under their desire to belong to a fan base.
It's really that simple.
not the movies'
It would have been awesome to see a program enter a user interaction portal, toss its disk in the air and berate it's user for not harvesting crops.
With how fast the computer runs I imagine it would be horrible if you were a program. Imagine the latency dealing with typed or spoken commands. It would be like a 100 year conversation. It sounds like an anime plot though. The young male protagonist gets brow beat by the attractive program who has a day job of prepping programs for the games.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
"With negative reviews of the new movie often referencing the 'sub-moronic script that feels like it was written by people who had never used a computer"
There's a direct reference to open-source software "the way that Flynn intended" in the first scene.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
While they all agreed the CG and 3D was amazing, they felt the story was 'unimaginative' or 'run-of-the-mill.' Also, many people born later, such as my younger sister, who is very tech savvy herself, seemed to dismiss the plot and characters completely, instead speaking only of the quality of the graphics and the music.
The story was run of the mill. It was a 'get in and get out' story that we've seen a million times.
The characters were hollow and made no progression whatsoever through the story. Tron can be dismissed as an unfamiliar robot who makes a complete reversal for no reason whatsoever at the end of the story. Clue (not sure about the spelling) is a copy-and-paste villain :P. When the guy first meets his father living with the chick, the kid doesn't even ask who she is or why she is there. She's a glaring hole missing that you know will inevitably be explained, but when it is explained you feel completely cheated because he would have immediately been like "Who is this chick?" Even if you accept the sci-fantasy premise, the dialog is ridiculous at times.
So, what else is there to talk about? The visuals and sound were amazing. I give it 3.5/5
It appears that MoldySpore is apologizing for a lousy movie that he liked because of the nostalgia that it stirred in him for the original. Those not afflicted with nostalgia dismiss the movie for what it is: an Avatar-like 3D craptacular with neat effects and forgettable plot/characters/music.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Exactly.
It's not that we're becoming less imaginative. It's that our imagination is moving past the basic technology now. We're engulfed in a world with more possibilities now. Our imaginations are being pointed elsewhere.
"Stepping back from the positive and negative reviews of the new Tron sequel, Tron: Legacy....I believe this speaks to how the human race has grown out of its own imagination when it comes to technology since it entered the digital age."
Where I come from that's call hypocrisy with false pretenses; let me elaborate:
A person's opinion cannot and should not be used as the defining data point for discerning if they are "un-imaginative." That's statistically flawed, small sample size from near infinite population of imaginative activities. Let alone, close-minded of the author. It seems this author claims to be unbiased in this quote when in actuality he's appealing to the largest population (both sides pro/con-Tron: Legacy) to garner an audience, then he subtly forces his opinion on the reader by stating that "I believe this speaks to how the human race has grown out of its own imagination when it comes to technology since it entered the digital age" or in a nutshell I heard "people who don't like Tron: Legacy are unimaginative, what do you think?" The "what do you think?" is simply his way of covering his a*s and appealing to the largest population while prefacing with his biased opinion. People who use this tactic are crafty liars who use word-play and misdirection to obtain what they want (e.g. slimy car salesman, lobbyists, politicians...etc). Liking or disliking a movie in no way discerns an individual's creative potential let alone, the ability of a generation of a species.
My Movie Opinion - I never saw the original Tron and figured I'd give this new movie a fresh and fair assessment with no expectations. Being a fairly tech-savvy person as I watched Tron: Legacy I became more and more disgusted with the way the story played out. It picked-and-chose when to apply logic (real-world physics...etc) and creative liberties, such as - Dr. Flynn (dad) was a prisoner of Clu, yet he possessed enough power to simply walk up to ANY person/program and reprogram them within 10 seconds? If you can walk up to anyone and control them in 10 seconds or less what is there to fear from them? Let alone if you have all these matrix-y area affect powers...but I digress all-in-all I thought the movie had enjoyable metaphors, yet was lacking in the writing department to properly express these ideals. VOTE: 5/10 (that's rounding up)
Just today, I was reading Man Lives In Futuristic Sci-Fi World Where All His Interactions Take Place In Cyberspace. The story goes well with the review. Cyberspace used to be portrayed as this crazy password-protected ghetto where people suffered severe brain damage if someone unplugged their 2400 baud modem while they were online.
Now, we see it so much, every day, that we have trouble thinking of it as exotic and futuristic. So, you bought your shoes in cyberspace...Big deal. The internet is no longer the "frontier" it used to be, and people interacting online are no longer the tech-savvy elite that you would have expected 28 years ago. Is it any surprise that we now have people scratching their heads about all the virtual reality cliches?
I didn't know this until today, but Tron gave us Perlin Noise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise
So, thank you Tron for letting me steal code for use in my shaders*.
* - Shaders (as characters) would be quick and like shape shifters. Weakness would be "injections" to shut them down or bad drivers :). I would say that would make a good plot for Tron, but who am I kidding. As long as Hollywood can get people coming to the theaters with crap stories - especially with "geek" movies. Though, they don't work for me. The only real Transformer movie had Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, Eric Idle, and Orson Welles. Oh, and Scatman Crothers.
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
You can talk during the previews. You might even get to the theater early and talk while your group gathers in the lobby. Or you could drive to the theater together and socialize in the car. Then after the movie you could all discuss the movie (or whatever else) on your drive home.
Movies are also long enough that you'll frequently want to refill your belly before or after the film. This phenomenon has led to the common phrase: "Dinner and a movie". Unless everyone stares at their plate and chews in silence, that too would be a peg more social than Pizza Pockets and a DVD alone at David's house.
You must have not seen Tron when it was released in the theater, so your comments are /dev/null.
--end of line--
Any kid with a cheap computer can do stuff that rivals the best movie effects of 30 years ago
You're right
Many people keep talking about a plot... but which one? What plot are you thinking about? I liked Tron Legacy, and I liked the first Tron as well... There is a "plot" but you shouldn't be looking for "the main story line" to be the "plot"... For instance, in Tron (1) the main story is about Flynn having some programs ripped off and getting canned, then looking for that redeeming information in the system via hacking... The Plot, however, is about the MCP and it's purpose, and how Alan was fighting against it... freedom of information... maybe just freedom in general... we can apply this "plot" and "moral" to any number of circumstances in our lives... In Tron (2) the "main story line" is about young Flynn losing his dad one day, and growing up a little worse for the wear... again, like the first Tron, this isn't the "plot"... The Plot is the struggle of "imperfection" vs. a perceived "perfection" and how, once loosed, some things are hard to undo and can actually be damaging, over all, to the desired outcome. You can also apply this moral (plot) to things happening to us today with legislation designed to "do good" but actually being "bad" for us over all. (Patriot act, health care legislation, net neutraility legislation, financial reform, move to socialism vs. free market, etc) Don't look at these movies for the "meaning of life", they are a "sub-plot" of life... The story on the surface isn't necessarily the "plot"...
--E--
I know it makes you feel smart to put off every movie claiming that people just like the special effects or such, but I actually thought this was a good movie. I liked the plot, the story and the ideas in it made me think, and it was well done. You can hate any movie if you try that hard, learning to enjoy something is a lot harder.
Feel free to pick apart each of my statements and to try to point out loopholes in the way I explained myself, you'll be wasting your time I'm not going to bother arguing what I said was clear enough I'm sure you understand what I meant.
Since there wasn't a 2D version available here - only the pseudo "3D".
Oh well, guess it'll be on TV one day.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I'm glad I decided to read one more comment. Thanks dude, you threw up an interesting point about starving writers. Hollywood = lame.
Jonathanjk.com
Has nobody heard of the singularity concept? True AI. The reviewers for the movie are both uninformed and narrow minded. I think the plot was brilliant and profound; reviewers get hung up on details such as, "where has the body been for 20 years?"
but from what I see in the mainstream world(having some connection with education) imagination is an endangered species
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Speaking from the group that saw the 1982 original in a theater, I also embrace the new storyline; the change-up, the suspension of disbelief and the "evolution" of the Tron world. I was just a grade-school kid then, and Tron was a completely unique film for the time.
Aside from being the pioneer of CGI effects, it was also a tale of oppression, tyranny and fighting for liberty. Only later in life did I recognize the paradigm of centralism vs. independence in computing; what one may interpret as the first glimmers of what the Internet should be. (nobody really knew of such a thing then)
In so much as Kevin Flynn wasn't even the "hero" of the movie, he was a sort of everyman/genius figure that we the audience accompanied through his adventure. He was a vidiot with a golden ticket to wonderland. His pivotal role moves the plot along, but only to reveal the true hero; Tron, a program created by the Alan Bradley character.
If you're talking about basing the film in fantasy... gotta say it; you're right! While there were only a few dozen computers in 1982 that could accomplish the 3D modeling and effects; there certainly weren't any smooth-glass full-interaction terminals in a desk, conversations with autonomous AI's that speak with a british accent or lasers that could digitize/record living matter through 'sucking cubes'. [sic]
Although, there were video games and that just about wraps-up Tron's connection to the real world. Of course, I wasn't even a teenager, so for me, that's the only connection it needed.
Barring all that, it was still a fantastic film for the sheer idea that there's an entire world in that one computer; specifically, a certain Encom 511 mainframe.
Learning about CS later in life showed me that the writers weren't completely tuned-in to the reality of computers, (Gibson put them to shame in that regard) but it was interesting to think that Tron represented a version of computing that may exist sometime... somewhere. To me, the fictional Encom corporation represents an application of computer science that we have yet to see... maybe if Amiga had the assets of Redmond, WA to innovate; maybe there's another permutation of IBM Cell architecture around the corner; maybe chips designed from neurological science? It was The Matrix that made the connection between "virtual reality" and identity projection via neuron stimulation. If that much is possible, then projecting one's ego into a Tron-like universe is not out of the question. There's no telling if the study of quantum entanglement will ever manifest into a cube-sucking laser... I'm not holding my breath for that one.
Responding to TFP: Yes, the proliferation and ubiquitous nature of higher technology in our everyday lives has altered our vision of technology. This isn't so much about the over-abundance or dearth of "imagination" for a film, but the presumptions on the part of the audience. If the audience's imagination is limited to what their iThing can do, then there's no way to stretch it to those super-computer dimensions, where this film exists.
The original Tron sparked my imagination about computers in a way that no other film can, from a time when "supercomputers" were actually super. The creation of Tron: Legacy has furthered the ideology of the first film, while managing to shake the Disney-fication veneer enough to make a visceral and gripping experience, and in classic "five steps of epic" style. For consummate film-goers like myself, it was a moving and inspiring tale with a delightfully imaginative and romantic ending.
...and it's got a bangin' soundtrack to match.
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
Reviewers know one thing: flim culture
They won't bother to fathom the subtleties or measure the depth of a franchise that they failed to understand in the first place. They use the 28-year gap between the films as an excuse to dismiss it.
They fail to understand that it's the only 28-year sequel out there, and a successful one. The only follow-up in a franchise that even comes close is the Indiana Jones/Crystal Skull debacle. Indeed, I believe they use that as a quantitative standard for aging filim franchises.
It's right there in his quote; "it... can't be understood". Funny. I understand it. I'm pretty sure a lot of you understand it. What's his barrier? His distaste for the new film must be a pent-up frustration from failing to understand either film. A point that he makes perfectly clear in those quotes. The narcissism of his conclusion leads me to my own; Ebert doesn't know squat about Tron, therefore his review is preeminently invalid.
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
I think you are dead right, actually. I realised this when I read that Tron was designed after the writer first saw Pong, was blown away by the transfer of a real game into a new medium & was fascinated by the idea of putting himself into the perspective of the game. That story reminded me of how I felt about the movie -- it was clearly silly and fantastic to have people running around in a computer, but no more so than quite a lot of other ideas people are happy to entertain to watch movies or participate in religion. Once you are happy to suspend disbelief it is a fantastic idea that all programs have some level of AI and are running around bereft of sensor information about their makers & having to rely on faith and imputation given the structure of their environment about what could have formed it.
"...each home should probably have one, albeit for reasons they couldn't quite pin down"
Hey Hey 16K! - M.J. HIBBETT AND THE VALIDATORS
We bought it to help with your homework
We bought it to help with your homework
And the household accounts
If your dad ever works it all out
Lunchtimes in the library, writing down the pokes and peeks
copying an access code, get a taste for home taping
Fetishists of map-making
Rubber keys and rotten leads, rand and run and load and screens
Then five minutes fingers crossed, hoping not to witness the terror
of R: Tape Loading Error
zx spectrum 81, dragon vic and oric1
commodore 64, amstrad and an acorn electorn
cheaper BBC micro
jet set willy, sabre wulf, lords of midnight, underwurlde
dark star, transam, ant attak
and of course, manic miner
the hobbit and knight lore and elite
It made a generation
who can code
A bubble before proper consoles
who all know
That the games you get today
well, they may be very flash
But they'll never beat the thrill of
getting through Jetpac, Oh!
Hey Hey, 16K,
What does that get you today?
You need more than that for a letter
Old Skool Ram Paks are much better.
x2
Personal Computer Games, Your Sinclair, 16K
Kempston Competition Pro, Crash and Cursor Keys
and GO TO Dixons and bother Saturday staff
with loops that never end...
For n=0 to 2
Those were the days
Next N
Meta will eat itself
Okay, you found a couple of major weaknesses in my post.
I think the written SF has been decades ahead of the movie side. That list of authors is almost where I left off, plus a few years later. I didn't follow the 90's literary SF much.
Perception is an odd thing, so I will grant that local impressions could seriously skew results. Suppose I compromise and say I missed it by a year, and backdate my general idea to 1981 to cover your results. The theme still is that right in that time frame computers were fresh and new. Then borrowing your next remark, we are agreeing that today's PC's are "Good Enough".
Then let's let both mobile sets and tablets hit their plateau, because I see them as basically a matched pair. Then yep, "who knows what's next".
My one guess is we are just on the verge of Monitor Glasses. I believe that will do fascinating things to the computing landscape.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Ok, I'm way late to the party here, but feel the need to share. I am one of those who saw the original in theaters and loved it, and have watched it several times through the years. I went to see Legacy and pretty muchly hated it. Yes, it had awesome special effects (for the most part), and was a sleek-looking movie. Setting the effects and eye-candy aside, there are several weaknesses that undermine its relationship to the first movie. Tron had a unique plot, Legacy has a Matrix-meets-Lawnmower Man plot. Tron had (mostly) likable good guys, I had to work at liking everybody except Alan. Quorra was nice to look at, but didn't really add anything at all. Tron had some great bad guys - you just love to hate Sark and the MCP. While the concept of Clu being a bad guy is great, the execution sucked due to the limited emotional range of Jeff Bridge's artificial face. And you never get to see Tron's face at all. Even Darth Vader has a facelike mask. Legacy is a dark, joyless movie, with some attempts at sly humor; whereas Tron had a great sense of honest humor (remember Bit?). Tron had a some great spiritual undertones, with the good guys being persecuted for believing in their Users/Creators (even tho the bad guys knew they existed too), and a Christlike sacrifice by Flynn. Legacy has more of a Zen thing going on, the yin-yang being Clu and The Dude. There is so much more - blood in the computer world, the annoyingness of Zuse, etc. etc. etc., but I think you get how disappointed I am with Legacy compared to Tron. My $.02.
I think the people that saw the original Tron at the time remember it as a much better movie than it really was.
Only partly true - I re-watched the original about a week before seeing Legacy, and... well, it's an 80s Disney live-action. It's pretty much what you'd expect plot-wise from that studio at that time. The acting is OK, but not amazing, although I think the blame rests more with lousy dialogue. The plot is standard adventure fare (guy gets lost at point A, must progress through set pieces B, C, D, and E to reach destination F; at the same time fighting villian X and his flunkies Y and Z). Swap the computers for Europe and the data for an Ark, and you've got Indiana Jones. Middle Earth + Ring = LotR. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The redeeming virtue isn't the plot, or the acting - it's the setting. And as someone above pointed out, there's a lot of newer, "better" movies that crib literally from the original. The opening "characters resolving into a cityscape" is almost a literal cribbing of Tron's opening sequence, for instance. (Substitute green characters for the original dots of light.)
In my own opinion, Tron has aged a lot better than other 80s media products (have you *tried* to watch an original A-Team?)