When Tron was first released I was in a grad level computer graphics class at a university in the USA midwest. I convinced our rather stuffy professor to take the class across the street to the "Cinema Twin" and watch the movie. In those days computer graphics consisted of mostly pen plotters and Tektronix vector displays - pretty dry stuff, lots of theory in the class but not much interesting output was generated. To say the collective minds of the class were blown away by the movie would be an understatement. In its own way it showed the future of CGI and what the this domain could look like. If you haven't seen it lately, give it spin - it holds up well.
Precisely because of the minimal gfx world I can't imagine it ageing. Ironically I think it's possible only Disney of the major studios could have understood the necessity as well as potential of audience imagination to fill out the emotional picture.
IIRC James Clarke (who developed the early graphics chips SGI was famous for) said something like "reality is just 80M polygons a second" (at least, in a gross approximation of how the real world is presented to our neuro-optical system).
I think I'm jaded, but even when I saw Tron originally, I was only modestly impressed with the CGI. It felt very wire-framey (similar to the Star Trek II genesis sequence) to me, even if (as you say) it had curves and filled polygons.
After some time working in computer graphics I realized that what I really needed/wanted was renderman and an entire team of animators/technical directors, circa 2010. So, basically subsurface scattering, monte carlo sampling, many light sources, rich models and textures. Obviously, none of that was really accessible at the time Tron or Star Trek II was made, but those movies opened the path for the necessary brain and money investment to make the Pixar rendering computer and the rest is history.
> I think I'm jaded, but even when I saw Tron originally, I was only modestly impressed with the CGI.
You’re being downvoted, but most of us who saw it when it was originally released were not impressed. My thinking on this is because we were searching for a different aesthetic, likely what we would see much later with Avatar. However, today, the Tron aesthetic has come back in a big way as a retro art style. This is not surprising. It may very well be the case that as contemporaries of the original Tron, it was not intended for our generation, but for the ones who would come later. Perusing art history, this seems to be very much the case. Most generations do not properly appreciate the art from their own time, either because they can’t or they are too focused on their own personal vision of what art should be. I can’t tell you what the real reasons for this are, but I think that the audience is a prisoner of their time, while the artist has more freedom with their vision to see farther than the species is able to do on the level of the group, which is confined by the herd and the status quo.
That's a valid concept, but I thought it incredible then and now. It wasn't a pure exercise in graphics for phds, but rather one part of a movie they struggled to get made.
And not a one minute sequence, but large sections of the movie, rendered by quite primitive chips.
The fact that realism was not the goal, but a cold, rigid computer world helps explain the art direction.
I think the departure from realism was difficult for the audience of 1982, which was still steeped in the softer aesthetics of 1970s naturalism. Tron took many decades to have a larger influence on the overarching culture. Daft Punk, the adoption of the vaporwave aesthetic in the 2010s, and countless other art movements owe a great debt to Tron.
Maybe older folks? As mentioned previously, as a kid I grew up on Space Invaders and Asteroids shortly before the movie came out. Couldn't get enough of the futuristic 80s aesthetic, and still look on it fondly. Wargames blew my mind as well.
I don’t think that the portion of the population who truly appreciates the Tron aesthetics is that much larger today than back then. It’s rather that the internet provides better visibility and discoverability for such non-mainstream interests.
No doubt, but when looking back at post 1982 art during that decade, do you see a huge influence by Tron? We didn’t really see it until the 2000s. There were a few underground artists experimenting with the Tron aesthetic up until that time, but they were mostly unheard of. I remember there was at least one around 1994 or so in SF.
> generations do not properly appreciate the art from their own time, either because they can’t or they are too focused on their own personal vision of what art should be
In this case it seems to be the art acquiring meaning from its successors.
There’s a short part of the solar sailer sequence with various landscapes that I always found particularly impressive for the time: https://youtu.be/8ruRruqKf5M?t=2m32s (the music isn’t the original in that clip)
For a long time I thought the sandy planes were a mandelbrot-like set, but it’s really a Mickey Mouse logo. :)
> It also had the misfortune of trying to compete with two other huge sci-fi blockbusters in the summer of 1982: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
I miss when "summer blockbuster" meant something other than the 40th Marvel comic movie and the 20th DC comic movie.
This is exactly how they lost me. I have no idea which ones I've seen and which I haven't, because from the title or a little blurb, they tend to smudge together. So rather than watching repeats, I just quit.
I saw Blade Runner and Road Warrior as a double feature. Blade Runner was pretty but Road Warrior was the one that kind of blew my mind. No way you kill the protagonist's dog and blow up his car half way into the film!
Yeah, I must be getting old. The whole "super hero" thing never resonated with me — not even as comic books. I'm okay with full-on fantasy like "Lord of the Rings" but this real-world + magic thing always felt ... disingenuous?
I love the movie, but just FYI, pretty much every scene with people in it is not CGI. It's hand draw backgrounds and tripled exposed live actors who were then physically hand compositied together
Watch a makng of movie to see
There's pleny actual CGI like the light cycles, the recognizer scenes, the MCP, the light sail.
The aesthetic choices for those "not CGI" scenes rarely get the praise they deserve. That high contrast b/w film stock that looks like straight out of something Fritz Lang if you ignore the neon overlays, brilliant. That's why it's aging so well, it simply does not look as "1982" as it could have, it looks like the entire history and future of movies at once.
Perhaps the most important role of the CGI is that of a distraction, because aesthetic choices like that tend to work best when you are not aware of them.
That everyone inside the computer is wearing some type of headgear helps too. Many sci-fi movies feel dated due to the use of contemporary hairstyles. This is somewhat true of Tron in the real world scenes but once in the computer, it does have a very timeless aesthetic.
What was mind-blowing was the aesthetics, and the concept of being “beamed” or digitized into a computer. I didn’t care a lot as a kid what was CGI or not.
neither did I. Only passing on how amazing it is that so much was hand made. Example, in the clip above: 2:15 to 3:10 and 4:35 to the end there's no CGI but it looks like CGI
Tron led me to code a 2D version of the lightcycle game on the C64, but it was super slow because I didn’t know assembly :). I then added random obstacles to the playing field to make it more interesting. A good friend later wrote Armagetron.
Much as I personally like the Wendy Carlos Tron work, I've got a feeling it didn't resonate with Disney audiences and that really hurt the film at the box office. The visuals were really slick but the music was very jarring and sometimes discordant for people used to saccharine soundtracks...
I wouldn’t say under appreciated, her albums sold millions and she has received several awards and is an important figure in the history of electronic music.
Just not as well known as she should be in recent times.
TRON was technologically notable because it was the first wide-release film to extensively use high-res CGI. Getting high-res electronic images transferred cleanly to film was still being figured out. I remember reading in an effects magazine about how they cobbled together a workflow to get images from the 4096 line frame buffer onto film.
First movie to use textured polygons instead of just colored!
Another fun movie. I believe the movie didn’t do great with test audiences, but they loved the bits with the alien(?) pretending to be the main character in his place and significantly expanded that part of the movie, which worked out great.
Hmm, it's imho inaccurate to put it that way. I don't think there is a single "generic city" in the US. I think most American villages, towns and small cities look and feel the same (they all have the same CVS, Walgreens etc, you need a car) but when it comes to big cities, US cities are vastly, vastly different. Living in NYC feels nothing like living in Boston, which feels nothing like SF, which feels nothing like LA etc... When someone says "generic American city" I really can't think of any streotypes... E.g. you can say American cities are very car-centric which is 100% correct for e.g. LA. But e.g. NYC and Boston ([1]) are very much the opposite, where arguably it's more comfortable to live without a car (especially the case in Manhattan or Cambridge). Just a few data points, I realize this is not a very important discussion.
[1] I was told Chicago is like this too, unfortunately never lived there myself.
Not the original commenter, but I presume they meant that if the location of the city isn't important to the story, then filmmakers can use buildings, streetscapes, etc to convey "city" without conveying "New York" or "Chicago". It didn't come off as disparaging American cities in general.
I don't know that Tron (2010) actually specifies any city name, so it's left up to the viewer's imagination what US city it's supposed to be. Presumably ENCOM is a US company and their "headquarters" tower is supposed to be somewhere in the USA.
Flynn's arcade exterior is in Culver City, California. Right around the corner from the hotel the actors for the Munchkins of The Wizard of Oz (1939) stayed.
Tron may have been the first movie I ever saw in a cinema. My parents took us to a drive-in. I remember having the crap scared out of me by the face of the MCP up on that enormous screen. I wouldn't learn about its ancillary awesomeness -- the primitive CG, the use of the Super Foonly, the fact that the MCP is named after the OS for the lauded Burroughs architectures (now Unisys ClearPath)... Like it or not, as much of a dreamlike mishmash as Tron is, it is bound up tightly with the history of our profession and an important piece of our lore.
I remember it well (I was 20). It was a very boring movie. I think it's famous just for being 1st, i guess they poured all the money into the CGI because it's a 2-star story.
They got so much right with that film. And so much wrong. It could stand a remake, or even a sequel where the Cygnus reappears after surviving it's apparent destruction.
True, it's exceedingly uneven, maddening even. The things it gets right, it gets so right that you can feel the potential the movie had, and then something clunky or poorly written shows up to ruin the moment. Similarly, the idea of remake both excites and frightens me because I have doubts that the high points would be matched by a modern version. Probably something mostly bland and generic, with some rapidly dated contemporary political themes thrown in the mix.
Although different in many ways, I think Event Horizon shares some similarities with The Black Hole. The Gothic style of the ship, the setting, the plot etc...
