On the new Tron movie
I’ll just come right out and say it: Tron is one my favourite movies.
It’s not great by any standard measure, but it had one attribute that made it stand out: the simulation. Visually, Tron was exceptionally well realised. It was beautiful, unique, considered, and somehow understandable. It successfully conveyed a vision for such an odd, outlandish (and cheesy) scenario, and I walked away thinking that if I were ever to be turned into a computer program, then everything would look like Tron. This is why Tron became an iconic film, and it’s why its sequel, Tron Legacy, probably won’t be.
It wasn’t just the visuals alone that made Tron what it was — the physical environment itself was a crucial factor in making the world seem ‘right’, even though it was clearly ridiculous. Tim touches on this in his Trembling Hand post about the light cycles in the new movie, and I couldn’t agree more.
[The original film] is still a wondrous representation of cyberspace, where the very laws of ‘nature’ are those that pertain to code, not particles. The low polygons, inertia-free movement and Gauraud shading were all essential to that vision. Making it more ‘real’ makes it more intuitive, but making it unreal was what originally made it unique.
Tron embodied the rule-based world of computers, and the art and action reflected this in every frame. The fact that these simple, low-polygon bikes could only move at 90-degree angles only emphasised the arbitrariness of the world — that the characters were in a human-constructed environment that valued order and efficiency. Indeed, it was quite a dark, horrifying place, where being permanently erased from the system, pixel by pixel, felt somehow more final than dying, for at least the latter contained the possibility of an afterlife.
Let’s look at the original light cycle sequence, which is still exciting after all these years.
Now let’s look at a light cycle clip from Tron Legacy (a better, higher res version is here).
It may be exciting and interesting in other ways, but it’s certainly lost something. It increased the polygon count, made things slightly more realistic, and borrowed a lot of the icons from the original — it certainly looks Tron-ish — but it lacks the essence of Tron. More critically, its treatment of cyberspace is somewhere in the middle of its minimalist predecessor and the simulacrum of The Matrix, but it ignores the conceits that made these worlds work.
On that note, I’m not judging the film outright, and I do hope to be surprised by the film. The trailer does look good despite my issues with it, and the cast and crew on the payroll is a pretty solid line-up (for what it’s worth). I’ll go into it with an open mind. Yes, really.
