*sigh* Another kid discovers "Tron" and wonders what’s the big deal. In many ways this is as big a deal as "Metropolis" or "2001" - it was that trippy for it’s time, and it change the movie game entirely.

We need to look at things with some sort of historical context - this was the FIRST film with any great use of computer graphics, back at a time when graphics companies were specialized to the degree that some could do booleans and others only primaries. The big Sark cruiser? It’s not glowing edges that give it it’s outline, but a 45-degree bevel applied to every joint…we’re talking Wright Brothers-level primitive here.

So, when you think of what Lisberger had to do: to convince a traditional studio (read: accountants) to make a experimental film, then get Grade-A actors to say things like "null-unit", then corral and marshall literally *every* computer design house in the world into a singular focus, some making models that others couldn’t and then adding them together using traditional animation techniques…it’s a monumental achievement that it came out as well as it did.

Those were the days when people still thought there’d be one big computer somewhere we’d all work off of, well before the Internet became that. The MCP was a rogue, uncontrolled program running amok, eating resources, closing out others from the system, but ultimately it’s still a story of one person with a personal computer changing everything. Tell me most movies have grown beyond that premise, I dare you.

The big thing was, Disney had it all and squandered it. It had every computer company jockeying to be in its stable and it could have done Jurassic Park or The Matrix or Toy Story at least 10 years before anyone else, but it didn’t realize what it had.

TRON was way ahead; it talked over the heads of computer nerds and Joe Public alike, speculating what this new computer generation would bring. Some things it got right, some things way, way wrong. But it dared to be vivid and different when the conventional wisdom would give you another "Herbie the Love Bug" movie, and for that alone it deserves more respect.

Damn kids. Now get off my game grid!

Before you sigh too hard, I am wondering what the big deal is in terms of liking the movie, not in terms of its influence. Only your final paragraph offers anything in terms of addressing why you may like the movie and not its influence on movies as a whole. The influence a film may have on the medium is completely different than how good it may actually be.

I see the influence and I realize how big the film was in terms of being one of the first CG films, but that doesn’t mean I have to also think it is some kind of masterpiece.

However, I am happy at least one person opened up conversation on this article. Thanks Jim! :)

bradbrevet said: Before you sigh too hard, I am wondering what the big deal is in terms of liking the movie, not in terms of its influence. Only your final paragraph offers anything in terms of addressing why you may like the movie and not its influence on movies as a whole. The influence a film may have on the medium is completely different than how good it may actually be.

I see the influence and I realize how big the film was in terms of being one of the first CG films, but that doesn’t mean I have to also think it is some kind of masterpiece.

However, I am happy at least one person opened up conversation on this article. Thanks Jim! :)

It’s not just that the film was big in terms of special effects, but in concept. No one was thinking in the terms of a computer world at the time when Tron came out. The movie was years ahead of itself. Is it a good movie? In regard to story, it’s fairly basic. You can change the setting and the story still works. You can take the digital world out, and replace it with ancient Greece. Make Flynn a disguised god from Olympus and Tron a gladiator slave and you can tell the same story. It’s the standard heroic journey. Nothing groundbreaking with that, but nothing wrong with it either. Star Wars offered up very little different in that regard.

But unlike Star Wars, Tron created a new way of thinking. This is inseparable from determining whether the movie was good or bad, because the film is simply a standard story being used as a delivery method for a new form of science fiction. It was ground breaking in many ways beyond CG. As opposed to being a product of it’s time, It was visionary. Unless you know of some other movie that put forward the notion of computers transmitting packets of data to one another (solar sailer) at a time when most people were struggling with pocket calculators.

As for dark… Lets not conflate dark with good (as is such a popular thing to do these days). Did Tron need to be darker to be better? And lets’ not skip over the darkness that was present. You say there is nothing between the escape and the death of Sark? The death march of the out of date programs? The torture the MCP puts Sark through?

So yes, being groundbreaking, decades ahead of it’s time, does make it good. Even if the dialog is a bit tortured from time to time. Add in the amazing Moebious and Syd Mead visuals and a soundtrack that was quite appropriate at the time of release, and it measures even higher.

And yes, The Matrix ripped it off. Same with the many, many other things. And many times I’ve seen people roll there eyes at the notion of Tron. They’ve seen the ideas of the film played out too heavily in other places. It reminds me of when I see people dismiss the quality of Lovecraft because the ideas have all been reuses by Stephen King.

Theplanetsaturn said: As for dark… Lets not conflate dark with good (as is such a popular thing to do these days). Did Tron need to be darker to be better? And lets’ not skip over the darkness that was present. You say there is nothing between the escape and the death of Sark? The death march of the out of date programs? The torture the MCP puts Sark through?

So yes, being groundbreaking, decades ahead of it’s time, does make it good.

I agree, being dark does not necessarily make it good, but I felt the soundtrack was far too cheery based on what was going on. That’s all I was saying there.

However, being ground-breaking does not make something good. It makes it ground-breaking and a leader in terms of style and idea. I am not saying Tron was bad, I am just saying on a whole I don’t understand the major infatuation.

If you create something that resonates so strongly with society that it is imitated to such an extreme, it’s a pretty strong indicator of quality. Innovation has always been a factor in measuring quality. Regurgitating ideas is comparatively easy to formulating something brand new. That’s what this film did. It created something new. As for the infatuation, I think it helps if you saw it when it was released. This was an era where the most popular sci-fi film had an ice planet, a desert planet and a tree planet as it’s locations. Yeah… maybe it would get all crazy and have a cloud city or a really big space station (or two) here and there. But still, this was about as unusual as it got. Then along comes Tron with it’s prescient vision of cyberspace. A digital realm in a reprogrammable reality. For those of us who saw it when it hadn’t been done a thousand times and the concepts thrown about weren’t commonly understood, it was jaw dropping. Add in designs by someone like Moebius… There you go. Was it brilliant in terms of basic story? No. Like I said early, it’s a standard story. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing great either. But if you’re looking for the source of the infatuation, you have to look at the innovation (in the conceptual sense, not in the technical sense). And separating innovation from quality removes a very important measure of quality.

As for the darkness thing, what I was responding to was this: "Any sign of darkness is gone once Flynn, Tron and Ram escape following the light cycle battle. It was all roses until the finale against Sark and the MCP, which was actually pretty cool, especially when Sark takes a code disc to the dome."

But there were signs of darkness past this point and it wasn’t all roses, was it?

As for the soundtrack… a matter of perception, I suppose. I always felt it fit the film well and was dramatic when it needed to be. A good example is where Flynn creates the junction beam and shortly after where the solar sailer is engulfed by Sark’s carrier. No.. it’s not a modern soundtrack. That much is true. But that the way it goes when a film is decades old.

Theplanetsaturn said: If you create something that resonates so strongly with society that it is imitated to such an extreme, it’s a pretty strong indicator of quality. Innovation has always been a factor in measuring quality.

Well, I don’t have to like it if that is what you are getting at. That’s like saying someone has to like a movie just because everyone else does.

The only thing I don’t want to do is start sounding like I am bashing Tron too much here because I did enjoy the movie, I just didn’t love it.

Personally I feel the same way about Citizen Kane. I know everyone loves that movie. I know it has had a MAJOR influence on many, many films. I know it is a good movie and does many things very well. I know it is a quality movie, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it. I wouldn’t care if I never saw Citizen Kane again, but that doesn’t mean I am disregarding its effect on society and film, which I talked about here.

I guess I look at films a little bit differently than others. I can appreciate innovation and originality, but when it comes down to it if it doesn’t entertain me in some way I don’t really consider it great. Movies, for me, primarily come down to entertainment and I know camera moves, cinematography and a variety of technical achievements can entertain folks and they entertain me as well, but some more than others. I am not discounting the greatness of films when I say these things, I am more often than not talking about entertainment value when I consider a film’s overall enjoyment level.

Hope that clarifies things a bit.

Oh… I would never tell anyone they have to like something. In fact, I can’t stand many things that I would consider good and I love some things that I know lack any real merit. I just try to be objective, and it seems you do as well.

In a large way, I think we are saying the same things. Just in different ways. Tron has flaws. The quality of the film will not be found in the dialog or the basic story or the acting. None of those aspects are terrible, but none of them are particularly noteworthy. The quality of Tron is in the originality of concept. Which can be considerably more difficult to perceive, particularly if the viewer in question has been bombarded with the concept from other, derivative, sources. Even when the derivative source is execute the concept in a more sophisticated manner, they’re still derivative. Refinement of a concept is far easier than the formulation of a concept.

Yeah, and actually I didn’t think the acting was all that bad. Actually, the score was the worst part of it for me and it wasn’t because it was a traditional ’80s style score as much as it was just a little too happy. I wouldn’t be surprised if I liked it a lot more if that score had just been changed. I know I keep saying it, but it really bugged me. :)

I will say I was shocked at how similar The Matrix trilogy was to this film though and Tron actually accomplished a lot of what The Matrix trilogy tried and in only 90 minutes.