Tron changed cinema, predicted the future of tech

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/05/tron-steven-lisberger-interview

by ColinWright • 4 years ago

186 116 4 years ago

dr_dshiv• 4 years ago

“Tron is so idealistic: ‘If we just get the tools into the hands of people, then democracy is assured for all time,’” he says. “The irony is that the computer has been used to just damn-near overthrow democracy! If someone had said: ‘If we put these tools into the hands of the public, it’s going to result in endless conspiracy theories, misinformation, lack of civility, endless rivers of porn, and the most violent video games you could ever imagine,’ we would have said: ‘Oh, no way. It’s going to be wonderful!’ It turns out we can predict the tools of the future but we can’t really predict the philosophies or the ethics of the future.”

I could cry.

jokethrowaway• 4 years ago

Another poor jab from the guardian.

Newspapers, television, even orators in the public foro have long allowed the wealthy to manipulate democracy.

Democracy has never been a perfect tool because people are gullible and fallible. But it's more convenient for politicians to decry the sins of their enemies than to admit their powers should be largely reduced or stripped away entirely.

Criticising a tool because it allow your enemies to speak is peak society polarisation; not long left before our empire will come down crumbling

toyg2• 4 years ago

It is true, however, that the internet has normalized pornography.

Most other effects are just Guthenberg-like ("people reading and writing their own bibles?!? Madness! And the result is all these new wars!"), par for the course.

ls15• 4 years ago

It turns out we can predict the tools of the future but we can’t really predict the philosophies or the ethics of the future.”

Haven't you seen Idiocracy?

hanniabu• 4 years ago

Idiocracy is basically the new 1984

prawn2• 4 years ago

Slightly related, but I quite like Tron Legacy (plus its styling and soundtrack). It's tame enough that you can watch with your kids. I've watched it with my young son, along with Interstellar and Inception, as things that encourage creatively think outside what we understand to be possible - even if just to have him thinking about story/game/play angles. Digital or dream worlds, time dilating/bending, etc.

Fnoord3• 4 years ago

I really like your attitude, but I have trouble with regards to scary scenes / events (also cause I know some scenes/movies/series made a lot of impact on me as kid like the werewolves from Ghostbusters). I remember the original Tron as more peaceful / less violent. Interstellar didn't contain violence IIRC, but Inception does. The woman goes batshit crazy. I'd also like to add Moon and The Matrix. But again, be careful with suspense and children. Moon's ending was a bit lurid.

As for the point being, the movie is from 1982 and was on about a battle between sysadmin/ML/AI and users, its also a homage to a community which did not exist back then in the same effect it does now (the FOSS community).

prawn2• 4 years ago

I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't impact him; he reacts quite clearly if something is problematic (he's read/watched LOTR/Hobbit and one moment he reacted to in The Hobbit movies was Bolg vs Kili). Mal in Inception was probably the heaviest thing as the gunplay there isn't overly visceral. We've watched The Matrix together, Ready Player One (undead ballroom was fine, but skipped the old zombie in the bathroom) and Ender's Game (has a graphic bullying revenge scene). I love Moon, but the language is a bit old for him for now - one day though, as I think that's one of the tightest sci-fi stories, and will get him thinking. Blade Runner too.

He'd probably cope with recent Dune, which I thought was very polished. We should watch The Martian, as he read Project Hail Mary and liked it. From memory, Arrival would be good assuming some of the undertones went over his head. Contact is another good one in a similar vein (common element with Project Hail Mary and Arrival of decoding messages).

JKCalhoun4• 4 years ago

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

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

dorfsmay• 4 years ago

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

mgoetzke• 4 years ago

Werewolves from Ghostbuster ? Are we talking the animated Ghostbusters ?

LargoLasskhyfv4• 4 years ago

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

eps• 4 years ago

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

koonsolo• 4 years ago

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

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

mindcrime• 4 years ago

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

InfoSecErik• 4 years ago

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

Andrew_nenakhov2• 4 years ago

Too bad they never made a sequel to Tron: Legacy

ekianjo2• 4 years ago

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

vaylian• 4 years ago

Funny. I think it is a really good movie. I like watching it again sometimes. But tastes are different I guess.

I also put on the soundtrack on a regular basis.

objclxt• 4 years ago

it was bad enough not to justify one.

Hollywood doesn't greenlight sequels based on how good or bad a film actually is. It's all about the numbers.

The budget for Tron Legacy was $170 million, and it made $400 million at the box office.

That sounds quite good - it doubled its money! - except film budgets don't include marketing costs, which for a blockbuster can be as much as the budget itself. I doubt that Tron Legacy broke even. If a blockbuster isn't making at least three times its budget it's going to be seen as something of a disappointment at the studio.

nonrandomstring3• 4 years ago

Even the CG was horrible.

There wasn't any. From TFA:

first attempt to visualise the digital realm itself

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

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

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

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

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

Hard_Space• 4 years ago

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

pferdone• 4 years ago

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

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

billyjobob• 4 years ago

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

ghostDancer• 4 years ago

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

JKCalhoun4• 4 years ago

Fans should.

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

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

satisfice2• 4 years ago

Tron was not a visionary movie. It was a dumb movie. I watched it in theaters when it came out. It didn’t make sense on any level. It’s not consistent with anything computers do or what information means to a computer.

It is a movie made by ignorant people who mapped a standard plot to a fictional concept of computing which resulted in nonsense.

It was painful to watch.

goto114• 4 years ago

It is not a movie about computers. The article explains it straightforwardly: It is a shaman traveling to the spirit world. It is a psychedelic adventure, using fictionalized computers and computer graphics as scenery. It was pretty groundbreaking in depicting a computer-generated magical world instead of the computer just being a voice coming out of a box.

pdimitar6• 4 years ago

I mean fair enough, fans are free to romanticize it all they want and that's fine and normal. But let's just recognize that what you said is an interpretation and not an objective fact.

anotherman5543• 4 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RichardCA• 4 years ago

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

https://youtu.be/YMIkU7YaOGo

thinkingemote• 4 years ago

Bad CGI is often just bad cinematography. The ability to have a camera anywhere goes to some animators and studios heads, and so the viewer sees something different than normal framed shots. Avatar was really bad for this. The first Tron film had good cinematography.

cal85• 4 years ago

There’s a newish David Attenborough–narrated CGI nature documentary about dinosaurs, and I think it suffers from something like this. The photorealism is top notch but it still looks fake. At first I thought it was that the dinosaurs’ movement felt off, but I now think it’s more that the the cinematography doesn’t feel enough like a nature doc. It feels more like a cinematic feature, where everything about the framing and mise en scene is intentional and beautiful, too much so. Bits of blurred foliage in front of the subject feel like a DOP’s intentional ‘dirty frame’ rather than something that accidentally got in the way of the (imaginary) camera operator while they tried to get their shot of a fleeting animal moment. It’s all just too nice and considered. Or maybe it’s just that I know it’s fake because it’s dinosaurs, making this an unsolvable problem, I’m not sure.

InCityDreams• 4 years ago

I see every movie in the same light. I know it's just a bunch of actors and directors and gaffers stitching together various shots and scenes, so occasionally it is a real treat to watch something and forget all that.

saos• 4 years ago

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

snarfy• 4 years ago

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

tronster• 4 years ago

Loved the movie as a kid; it changed my life (even though it took me a few times of watching it to fully understand what was happening.)

The sequel, "Tron Legacy", was a fun action movie, with a great sound-track but it's computer world felt "smaller" than the 1982 original and it didn't deliver on the deeper themes.

I would still watch either one today and am hoping for a third. Until then, there's always riding light cycles at Disney World: https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2022/07/celebrate-the...

laumars2• 4 years ago

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

jgrahamc• 4 years ago

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

beloch• 4 years ago

Anthropomorphize computer programs and invent a BS way of injecting a real human into a computer and Tron is what you get. It's complete nonsense! However, if you can suspend disbelief, Tron is a seminal film that has echoed through all of cinema for decades and is a helluva lot of fun to boot. It is the 80's in a single film. It oozes style and is a groundbreaking technical tour de force that must not be missed by any serious fan of movies.

The sequel is an epic Daft Punk music video that far surpasses "Interstella 5555" and, for that reason alone, is required viewing unless you absolutely hate Daft Punk. There's a cartoon series, Tron: Uprising, that is excellent even though it was cancelled after one season. (It stars Elijah Wood, in case you needed another reason to check it out...)

Tron may not be the most commercially successful movie franchise of all time, but each instalment of it has been a truly novel treat. It's may be style without much substance, but what style! I eagerly await my next dose!

laumars2• 4 years ago

The cartoon series is arguably the strongest instalment in the franchise. It's got the strongest story line and the most depth to it. It's a great loss Disney cancelled it

nazka3• 4 years ago

Anthropomorphize computer programs and invent a BS way of injecting a real human into a computer and Tron is what you get. It's complete nonsense!

It’s true but some tech innovations now do stuff we thought dumb and/or impossible like in Blade Runner and the “enhanced” tech meme. Fast track to today, it’s not the full thing but we thought that even being able to “enhance” a picture even once was stupid. Now you have ML model doing just that and some companies selling this tools to photographs and stuff. It’s crazy

yjftsjthsd-h• 4 years ago

Although, due to the way ML does that image enhancing it wouldn't actually work for any of the things it's used for in the show (since we still can't create information out of nothing).

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

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

jakeledoux• 4 years ago

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

End of line.

usefulcat• 4 years ago

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

dahart6• 4 years ago

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

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

harpiaharpyja• 4 years ago

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

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

LargoLasskhyfv4• 4 years ago

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

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

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

Brendinooo2• 4 years ago

Being a huge fan of the 2010 sequel, I finally watched the original a couple of years ago. If you’re not affected by nostalgia or if you weren’t there when it changed the game, it’s not the greatest movie.

It’s pretty weird though…the good kind of weird, I think. And it was interesting to see how it immortalized a very early 80s sense of computing: everything is a “program” that does a single, limited thing.

JKCalhoun4• 4 years ago

I think most "kids films" trip when they fall back to having to have a villain (hisssss!) to drive the plot.

Faceless Corporation would have been slightly less tropey but perhaps a little too, ahem, meta for the kids to understand?

gfxgirl• 4 years ago

Being a huge fan of the origianl I hated the sequel. Everything that made the original unique is tossed asside for bland and boring in the sequel. As a simple example, light cycles that turn 90 degrees are interesting because they don't exist in the real world. light cycles that turn the same as motorcycles are less interesting beacuse we already have motorcycles in the real world. There's lots of that in the sequel where some artist didn't get that the limitations of the original add to its appeal.

Brendinooo2• 4 years ago

Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing.

But I thought The Grid was anything but bland and boring. It was beautiful and unique! The End of Line entrance and subsequent fight is iconic; I love when “God” enters the fray.

And speaking of limitations adding to appeal, the uncanny valley de-aging of Jeff Bridges works (opening scene aside) because CLU himself is not quite right.

I could go on. The director went on to do Oblivion and the new Top Gun; both were really well-crafted.

pdimitar6• 4 years ago

Watched "Tron: Legacy" several years ago and it all seemed like a new and fresh coat of paint put on the excuse to put young people in skintight suits and have them fight nonsensical battles so we can gasp at how athletic they are. There were parts and scenery I did like but they weren't many. It felt very rushed.

I know how nostalgia works and I'm not demeaning the good memories many people have of the original.

At the same time, it should be recognized that if you don't have a nostalgia for this franchise then it's pretty meh. Same with Blade Runner.

pitaj3• 4 years ago

Tron: Legacy has its flaws.

Blade Runner: 2049 is critically acclaimed and one of the greatest movies I've ever seen. It's beautifully shot and wondrously cinematic, with incredible visual effects. Better than the original.

pdimitar6• 4 years ago

I don't get this need to try and paint a subjective experience into an objective fact.

"Interstellar" was loved by many yet me and my wife and like half the cinema (we were about 40 people in the theater at the time) couldn't stop cringing and gasping "oh come on!" for most of the movie. Same with "Blade Runner: 2049" btw. There were also a good number of people who left midway, too.

You like "Tron" -- no judgement from me. Good for you, glad you liked it, that's why we should watch movies: to get some positive emotion and/or education out of them, right? But it does come across as pretentious to try and make an art perception into an objective process. It really is not. It's a personal emotional experience.

To give you the reverse example, I absolutely loved the "Avatar" (with the blue aliens), yet I know of several internet communities that will never tire at spitting at it. I am fine with it and I never took offense or tried to paint the movie better when I was there.

I don't need validation from other people to like what I like.

corrral2• 4 years ago

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

Kinda like the Watchmen TV series.

LargoLasskhyfv4• 4 years ago

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

moomin• 4 years ago

A fun thing about those 80s wire-frame graphics: many of them weren’t CGI at all. The desire for the “computer 3D” look was such that quite a few film-makers faked it up using actual 3D models painted to look like wireframe.

dazzawazza• 4 years ago

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

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

tootie• 4 years ago

A lot of visuals were just hand-animated. Especially the fluorescent highlights over the human actors. Just drawn on top of the film. Only a handful of sequences were fully digital, but it was still mind-blowing for 1982.

JKCalhoun4• 4 years ago

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

Hilarious — analogism raises its ugly head.

corrral2• 4 years ago

I get what they mean, though. Computers have made every "making of" for FX-heavy movies super boring, except the few that still have some notable practical work, too.

falcor84• 4 years ago

It's not exactly a "making of", but I found this explanation of the evolution of hair in Disney/Pixar features to be extremely interesting:

How Disney's Animated Hair Became So Realistic, From 'Tangled' To 'Encanto' | Movies Insider https://youtu.be/cvTchBdrqdw

weldedtogether2• 4 years ago

Tron is probably my favorite movie of all time! A fun adventure movie that's amazing to look at through the entire movie thanks to the immense effort put forth by the entire team, even if the story goofs up in a few places. If you have the time, watch The Making of Tron documentary where they go over (and show) some of the processes they used and show them as well!

One thing I can't get over in regards to the sequel (Legacy) is how it changed the aesthetic of the computer world from nice bright neon on white and vivid purples to all black and neon blue or orange! Legacy is jam packed with CGI but it's still less visually interesting to look at (in my opinion) because of the lack of color. Not to mention it moves away from the "power to the users/believers" angle of the first film to try and take a philosophical stand on everything that amounts to meaning nothing.

Tron is a truly unique movie in everything it did, and my greatest sadness is that nothing that came after it has the same look and feel as the original. The closest we get is the world they had in Kingdom Hearts 2...

lawgimenez• 4 years ago

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

weldedtogether2• 4 years ago

Yeah it clearly struck a chord with a lot of people. I just wish we could have gotten something more of the original aesthetic... seems Legacy has sort of overwritten Tron in a lot of minds of both people and producers. At least the original isn't going anywhere!

epx• 4 years ago

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

ColinWright• 4 years ago

Well, given that Tron came out in 1982 and I got my first computer in 1979 ... not me.

My first programs were sorting algorithms, then I got tired of how slow the machine was, taught myself Z80 machine code (not assembler, machine code) from a book, figured how to smash the stack, created a machine code monitor, and wrote a compiler to translate up my BASIC programs to Z80.

jecel• 4 years ago

In 1979 my high school friends and I used to play a game on paper that was essentially "light cycles". We used a sheet of graph paper and took turns extending our previous walls (each drawn with a different color using a fancy four color pen) by one more square.

None of us has access to computers back then, though our science fair project that year was a microprocessor based video game (using the Signetics 2650). We ran out of time to implement our own games, but "cycles" would have been our second right after "pong".

I did not think of having a character at the leading edge of the wall until I watched "Tron", however. And then I did implement it like that on my TI99/4A including the movie's theme music.

While I couldn't find the name of the paper version of the game we played, it seems that there was already a two player arcade version in 1976 called "Blockade" by Gremlin.

1MachineElf• 4 years ago

I was thinking of Tron just a couple hours ago, indirectly, because of public reaction to a video of a recent DJ set. The DJ (named Blessed Madonna, formerly Black Madonna) played Thomas Bengalter's 1995 Ventura. The video was had a lot of clips mixed in reacting negatively to the song and the DJ's skills on her mixing deck. Most of the comments were very disparaging. Knowing who Thomas Bengalter is, a co-founder of Daft Punk, it was bind blowing how people could react so negatively to the same sound behind the acclaimed Tron soundtrack.

racl101• 4 years ago

I just really liked Wendy Carlos' soundtrack. Still listen to it. It has such a calming presence.

Say what you will about Daft Punk and Tron Legacy but the original Tron OST is underrated.

excalibur• 4 years ago

Tron was also the first attempt to visualise the digital realm itself – what was then called “cyberspace” but might now be termed “the metaverse”.

Every time you use that word, Zuckerberg kills a puppy.

Tron changed cinema, predicted the future of tech

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