The enduring appeal of Tron: The legacy of 'Tron' - CNN.com
Ok, I did find lots of things silly about it, the biggest one being the feeling that The Dude was being channelled, but that actually doesn’t bother me at all now that I’m watching the original and am seeing that The Dude has maybe quite a bit of Flynn in him in the first place. 
That mainframe really tied the room together.
And as for the arcade? Eight year olds, Dude.
I never saw the original, will I like it?
I really think that seeing the new one first, and then watching the original, will make the original more entertaining than watching it first. It’s not that it’s awful, it’s dated and having some future reference for it really makes it more interesting. Well, to me anyway.
Well, technically FLynn achieved a perfect network when the ISOs showed up. It only went back to its gladiatorial roots when Clu took over and went all rampagey.
Nonetheless, you point still stands. Clu is really obsessed with imperfection and making a perfect world and I don’t see the point of the games that being the case. Also,
I was unclear as to why Clu would go all Godwinny on the ISOs if he was so single-minded about a perfect world. If they are basically perfect code, you’d think he’d want them around.I think they explained that in some expository dialog, but my mind had wandered off to other things while I was waiting for them to stop talking.
The movie wasn’t as bad as we were expecting. I was the only one in our group who recognized Daft Punk. I started getting really pissed evey time Sam got his data disk out and assumed a fighting stance saying: “Okay” as if he meant to say “Bring it!” and then for whetever reason the would-be epic battle never happened. Just when he would square off with someone, he’d be rescued.
My wife was unclear about something too (and maybe we’re just not remembering somethng from the original movie). The data disks are precious. They contain all you knowledge and the coding of your physical being, like Quorra was repaired and re-booted so why are they also thrown around like frisbees? I mean, I like the disk weapons, but if one bad toss means your disk is gone for good, it seems a little weird.
As to the OP spoiler:As he was sinking in the water, his suit dimmed from eeeeeevil “orange”, to “off” (I guess he was rebooting), back to… “white”! Joy! Rebooted Tron is a good guy again! Tron’s fate is to be scheduled to appear in a direct-to-video sequel.
True, perhaps, though we don’t see what the network was like in the 7 years between first getting there and the coup. However, Clu is implementing perfection…as envisioned by Flynn at the time of Clu’s creation. (that was a point made in dialog “I was wrong, but you wouldn’t know that because I didn’t know that when I made you”).
So I still blame Flynn.
In the original Tron, the Master Control Program was taking over network functions and sending obsolete programs out to fight and die in game programs as a way to wring some use out of them. I assume that’s the same thing Clu is doing. The combat isn’t the network. The combat clears away programs that have been removed from the network for being imperfect.
I really thought that the spare lightcycle he clipped to his leg was going to come into play.
So when I click and drag a file over to my Trash, I’m sentencing some poor bastard to die in the arena?
:: Mua-hahahahaha ::
Die, you out-of-date version of yahoo Messenger! Die!
And the purpose of the thousands of programs gathering to watch this process? Or having returning celebrated giants of gladiator combat? Not to mention having wino programs who can be used as a scapegoat by setting them up to steal your motorcycle.
My point is not that the function wouldn’t be needed but that Flynn (or his cloned personality) would be able to select the metaphor by which the function is performed. Blood combat as entertainment, especially after he’d personally been through it, seems an odd choice.
Though I guess I’m also confused by the computational metaphor an ultralounge represents.
The ISOs aren’t “perfect” in the way CLU interprets the word. They’re the products of a stochastic process and are essentially like weeds to him.
obfusciatrist, you seem to just dislike the whole premise of the film. That’s fine, but I’m wondering if nostalgia is colouring your affection for the original. You’re looking for very rigid analogies rather than metaphor with poetic license, which is what the original was as well.
I mean, what was the purpose of Bit’s role in the original?
No, I don’t require the metaphor. But what I see as a flaw in the movie that runs counter to the characterization in the movie was defended as analogy, so I’m just responding to that and don’t think it makes any sense either. If gladiatorial combat continues in the grid it is because gladiatorial combat is what Flynn (in one of his incarnations) wanted. And if Flynn wants gladiatorial combat in a network he expected to change the world, that doesn’t speak very well of him.
That said, the frequent (though by no means complete) structure of analogous function in the first movie is indeed one of the things I like about it and is something almost completely abandoned in this movie.
The real reason, of course, that gladiatorial combat continues is because it was in the first movie and they weren’t trying to extend that story at all but simply to remake the first movie and wring money from it. And, to me, that is the fatal flaw because if I wanted that I could just rewatch the first movie. Tron: Legacy presents no justification for its existence beyond simply trying to make more money off of Tron. I have no problem with Disney doing that (and I have hopes that it will spawn some more good computer games), but it doesn’t make the movie worthwhile.
As near as I can tell, the premise of the movie is “just show what the 1982 movie would have looked like if 2010 CGI had been available.” As for the general story of the movie, I have no problem with that, but do have big problems with the execution.
Heh… we walked out and my husband turned to me and said “The Flynn abides”.
Count me in as someone who just saw the original for the first time last week and who thought it was, even for the time it was made, cliche and kind of boring. The 2010 movie… very pretty, slightly less cliche and boring, but still not what I would call good.
For my money, they actually succeeded in making a modern movie with the appeal of Tron. That may well be its downfall. The fact is that a lot of people aren’t inclined to like Tron, and that’s understandable. For example, what I would call “Ponderous and contemplative without being slow and tedious” others would just call “slow and tedious.” And Disney must have assumed the same thing, because they made no attempt to promote the film by putting out a special edition of the previous film – they didn’t want to remind people who haven’t spent the last three decades thinking about the movie what it was really like.
I expected much less than this. The visual style was well adapted to new technologies and new expectations, with little to frustrate my old expectations. Hell, I would argue that the club scene was much better integrated with the world as established than what I regard as the jarring “hooker” scene from the original. The soundtrack didn’t have quite the effect on me as the original Wendy Carlos Williams music that still thrills me to hear.
As I’m currently trying to get through Back to the Future II while waiting for the game to come out, I’m glad to be reminded that sequels sometimes really add to their franchises: Aliens, Terminator 2, The Empire Strikes Back, and now Tron Legacy.
Of course, aside from the stunning aesthetic that they surprisingly made work again (except for losing the film grain that I found fascinating in the original), this time they did actually try to underpin the franchise’s bizarre metaphysics. It won’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny, but I preferred it to the original’s stark refusal to give you any reason to believe any of this shit (though that technique had also been surprisingly effective). Expanding on the notion of crossing between two realities raises the stakes on the unsupportable notion of equivalence between humans and computer programs – crazy, and they don’t try to explain it, but if you’ll come along for the ride, it does make what happens more than a little drama among discrete quantities of data. The hints that the company created something more like a neural matrix taking on a life of its own than a 1982 computer network that couldn’t even store a copy of the movie, much less have such a world going on inside it. It still leaves a lot more implied than explained, though that may be for the best. I’m going to remain high on the thrill of it for a while before I go thinking about it any harder.
I thought it was a blast. If you want to tear it apart as a failed attempt at sci-fi go ahead. I don’t think it’s trying to be sci-fi. I’d categorize it more in the fantasy genre. And as a fantasy film with a cyberspace setting it’s just a complete thrill.
I loved the original and it always exsisted as something more exciting in my mind than what was on screen. This seemed to bring to life what I was imagining back then.
I loved the old nastalgic touches not of just the original Tron but of the 80s. The old arcade with Journey and The Eurythmics playing, Flynn still talking like he’s stuck in the 80s.
Even the CGI CLU fit right in. The CGI still looked a tad unreal which made sense since CLU wasn’t real.
Saw it in IMAX with the Daft Punk score pounding. I’ll probably catch it again before it leaves the theatres.
I guess they never said one way or the other, but I had naturally assumed that the gladiatorial arena was something Clu had added to the matrix after the coup against Flynn. Clu was created to build the perfect system, but obviously, he had different ideas about what constituted “perfect” than Flynn did.
On the other hand, Flynn did start out as a game programmer, so some sort of game would be a natural thing for him to include in his vision of a perfect world. I’d expect that, when he was in charge, the games were not played as blood sports, but just as sporting competitions.
That’s exactly what the prequel comic portrays. Not sure if that came from the filmmakers or not, but it makes sense, IMHO.
I enjoyed the movie, but I think they really needed a better director. The film needed to either be colder and crisper, playing with silence, like 2001: A Space Odyssey OR it needed to be faster paced with more vibrancy to the action sequences. Nothing had me on the edge of my seat. Regardless of whether Sam was sitting about talking nicely to Quorra or jumping off a building, the feeling of action was pretty well the same. There wasn’t a speed up in tempo for the acting, the editing, nor the music and the camera angles didn’t emphasize the movement. But again, I’d be just as happy if the film had been satisfied with being calm and cold throughout, and run with it. You could get Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo), Steven Soderbergh (Solaris), or Gore Verbinski (The Ring) to direct it.
Since almost every scene was an action scene, making the action better would of course have been the easier (and more financially viable) solution.
They also needed a better cinematographer. The Grid world was certainly beautiful, so yeah every shot was beautiful in the same sense that you aren’t going to be able to take a bad photo of Salma Hayek’s body, but every shot could have been stunning in its own right. Particularly at the end when they’re back in the real world and riding around on Sam’s bike, the whole point of that scene is that The World is a Beautiful Place. Yet, the camera shots just weren’t all that great.
Overall, everything was sufficient, but doing at least one thing really well could have made the film significantly better, particularly in making it a lot more stylish, or at least making it more edge-of-the-seat.