TRON is an awesome movie (spoilers)

[djbeatmongrel]

This weekend i was out buy random things media related and i came across the 20th anniversary edition of TRon on dvd for $15. i've never scene the movie before and i thought it was a good price so i decide to pick it up.

so i got home, made a bowl of popcorn, turned of and set my ps2 up to play muh TRON dvd (i have to have my remote). Then the fun begins. once i saw the first major CG scene and got my first real feel for Flynn at his arcade, i was totally hooked. Flynn instantly became my idol with his John Crichton(Farscape) like persona and true love for the art of digital gaming.

Every aspect of that movie was done perfectly. The references to computing, the cold dark computer environment, the glowing American Gladiator get-ups, the data frisbees and the insane polygon environment just blew my mind.

if there ever was a movie to watch about videogames TRON easily it. Too bad it tanked in the theatres. now i all i have to see is the big screen nintendo advertisement called the "The Wizard" LOL

[Flack]

TRON, along with Cloak and Dagger, Wargames, and The Last Starfighter, were four movies that changed my life in one way or another. That was a really great time in film making.

Rent Cloak and Dagger and not only will you get an action adventure involving an Atari 5200 cartridge, but you'll also discover where my alias came from. :)

[calthaer]

Now you need to go out, get the Tron 2.0 game, and play it. It is a completely worthy sequel to the film - great story, awesome FPS action - well worth the measly $20 they're charging for it now.

[djbeatmongrel]

its going for $20 already!?

[Daniel Thomas]

Tron was a pretty good movie. I remember how impressive it all looked way back when. When I was older, I realized that the movie was basically a computer-generated ripoff of The Wizard of Oz, but it was still pretty good for its time. I can't say it's a movie that holds up for me today, but I'm older and my interests are much different.

Of course, the video arcades based on the movie were the best. I wonder why no one has ever made an online version of Disks of Tron? Wouldn't that be cool?

[Jorpho]

its going for $20 already!?

Aye, but last time I checked, you need a video card that supports hardware TnL in order to play it (i.e., at least a Radeon 7200). I hope this is one of those games that gets released in a jewel case and stays in the bargain bin forever...

[kainemaxwell]

TRON, along with Cloak and Dagger, Wargames, and The Last Starfighter, were four movies that changed my life in one way or another. That was a really great time in film making.

Seen all those but Cloak and Dagger.

[djbeatmongrel]

i said spoilers just incase, i dont want to be the the dick that ruins it, plus its a gamefaqs habit lol.

[FABombjoy]

I first saw Tron when I was 5, and was completely mesmerized by it. 21 years later, I've probably watched it over 250 times. I can quote the entire movie from beginning to end, and given enough time with nothing else to do I could storyboard the entire thing with great accuracy. Obsessed? Naw. Just a big big big fan.

[Oobgarm]

its going for $20 already!?

Aye, but last time I checked, you need a video card that supports hardware TnL in order to play it (i.e., at least a Radeon 7200). I hope this is one of those games that gets released in a jewel case and stays in the bargain bin forever...

I'm not very computer savvy here, but I've got a cheap-o Xstacy GeForce 2 knock off card that runs Tron 2.0 just fine on a 1 Ghz machine with 256 RAM.

Again, I'm not sure if that's the same thing that Jorpho mentioned, but I thought I'd throw that in.

/hijack

[Keir]

I watched Tron on New Year's Eve for the first time in about 20 years. I thought it was terrible.

[hu6800]

TRON, along with Cloak and Dagger, Wargames, and The Last Starfighter, were four movies that changed my life in one way or another. That was a really great time in film making.

Rent Cloak and Dagger and not only will you get an action adventure involving an Atari 5200 cartridge, but you'll also discover where my alias came from. :)

Id have to go with
empire strikes back , RAD , Quicksilver and Tron.
i have em all on laser disk except RAD.

[Chunky]

every year i talk about all the background hidden mickeymouse heads, and everyone thinks i'm nuts. Still Fricken awesome movie.

[Lady Jaye]

@djbeatmongrel: I guess your copy of Tron is the bug-free version (early batches had a one-frame pixilation bug that'd screw up the image for the rest of the movie when viewed with a PS2)...

And Chunky, what Mickey Mouse heads? Give examples, please! :D

Does anyone remember the Tron plastic mini-frisbees that were in boxes of Shreddies when the movie first came out in the early 80s?

I second how Tron, combined with WarGames, is the great 1-2 punch of 80s computer movies.

[djbeatmongrel]

@djbeatmongrel: I guess your copy of Tron is the bug-free version (early batches had a one-frame pixilation bug that'd screw up the image for the rest of the movie when viewed with a PS2)...


Actually it did have some odd frame glitch at the part where Flynn meets CLU but it didn't happen once i started the dvd back at that chapter

[Chunky]

And Chunky, what Mickey Mouse heads? Give examples, please! :D


http://www.hiddenmickeys.org/Movies/Tron.html

didn't know there was this place, i remember this talk when it was in theaters, and this site acutually has a picture.

[Lady Jaye]

@ djbeatmongrel: oh, so you do have a bugged copy. You'd think that they'd be bug-free by now, after all this time... If the bug annoys you too much, contact Disney. You'll have to provide the disk's serial number (or something like that, I can't remember) and they'll send you a free replacement copy of the movie (in a paper slip case, not the whole package, but you don't have to send back the original copy). However, the bugged copy runs perfectly fine in most other DVD readers, just not in the PS2.

[Kejoriv]

I cant stand Tron. Ive tried to watch it a few times. In my opinion its horrible

[calthaer]

Aye, but last time I checked, you need a video card that supports hardware TnL in order to play it (i.e., at least a Radeon 7200). I hope this is one of those games that gets released in a jewel case and stays in the bargain bin forever...

Yeah, but the video cards that run this thing are by now probably pretty cheap. I only have a GeForce3 Ti200-based card and it ran the thing in max resolution with all the options turned up to high - with minimal slowdown in like one area or so. I believe the box says that you need at least a GeForce2. You probably just can't run it with those cheapie MX pieces of garbage that they put on stock Dells and Compaqs and junk like that.

[Phosphor Dot Fossils]

Wow, I don't guess I've run across anyone in the gaming community who didn't have a Tron jones. I guess it's a generational thing - for those of us growing up at the time it came out, it was a major WOW flick. I mean, it's not the best writing in the world, even if it did beat the Wachowski Brothers to their basic conceptual sucker punch by almost two decades, but it's got a look like nothing before - or since.

Me, I kinda like it, myself. :D

[Daniel Thomas]

Wow, I don't guess I've run across anyone in the gaming community who didn't have a Tron jones. I guess it's a generational thing - for those of us growing up at the time it came out, it was a major WOW flick. I mean, it's not the best writing in the world, even if it did beat the Wachowski Brothers to their basic conceptual sucker punch by almost two decades, but it's got a look like nothing before - or since.

Me, I kinda like it, myself. :D

Very true. But then, when it comes to movies, everything has a different context to later generations. An effects-heavy film like Tron would probably be lost on kids today, what with all the CGI littering (and oftentimes ruining, in my view) studio movies.

And as for the Wachowskis, the first Matrix was a good picture, but it was hardly original. What made it work was how cleverly all those influences were applied. Unfortunately, the sequels were so terrible that the original will probably fade over time.

[djbeatmongrel]

An effects-heavy film like Tron would probably be lost on kids today.

That hurts but its true. its hard being a 17 yr old that appreciates classics wether it'd be music, movies or videogames.

[Pantechnicon]

Saw Tron when it first came out. I was 12 at the time. Thought it was just phenomenal. Recently watched it again on DVD and was surprised how well it still holds up, from an entertainment standpoint. It was actually something of a treat on DVD, especially the sound.

I think that one of the things that makes it hard for a younger generation to appreciate Tron twenty-two years after its release is the temptation to rip apart the genreal understanding of computers presented in the movie in contrast to the context of our present familiarity. This would be too easy, and just as the movies of George Pal should only be judged in light of the pre-Apollo speculations regarding space travel, so too must Tron be afforded the same consideration.

For instance, Tron never seems to fully realize this idea of cyberspace as a purely virtual realm, and the computer world therein seems to have this tremendous physicality to it. What you see in Tron on the part of the actors is a lot of intense physical action in what appears to be a vast landscape. Aside from what happens on the game grids, what we see are a lot of scenes with actors pulling their bodies over walls and barriers, hopping over apertures and sliding down inclines all in the name of getting around in the computer world. They get fatigued, they get thirsty and you hear a lot of grunts and "oofs". There is one scene in the computer city where Tron is looking up at something on an upper level and you see in the foreground these things shaped like wires which are supposed to be towers of some sort.
The problem is that you're left with the notion that they are wires.

What this adds up to is an understandable inability on the part on the imagineers to divorce the corporeal aspects of a computer from the intangibles, or rather, to seperate the hardware from the software. The taglines for Tron boast about how the movie takes you "inside the computer" and it seems to me that the writers took this concept a tad too literally. It's as if the writers expected that if you opened up the dust cover on your PC you would see these little program people no larger than dust mites running around on the surface of a motherboard. They could have had a scene where Flynn tries to escape by crawling through a narrow tunnel which turns out to be a keyboard cable or an alternate ending where Sark is sucked into the turbine vortex of a power supply fan and pureed into little digital chunks.

Perhaps I'm not being fair with this physicality thing because I also have become too accustomed to the concept of "virtual reality", which is a term that was probably only known in 1982 by a no more than a couple of stoner grad students at MIT. So when I watch Tron today I want to see a virtual reality and instead I see something more akin to "Fantastic Voyage" inside a Commodore 64. The other problem with my beef is, of course, that you can't make a movie without actors, and actors, by definition have to act...grunt, oof, gasp.

But in the end, Tron surprisingly still showed quite a bit of vision
for its time. Perhaps this was unintentional as nobody knew what computers
would be like in twenty years. Still, one can see aspirations to address
certain profundities if one can squint hard enough to see past all the
backlighting.


One last little bit which is not related to the subject above but is
worth mentioning: Flynn is definitely not your typical software engineer.
He has his work stolen from him by his company. Does he complain to
management? Does he sue? Does he form his own startup? No. Instead he
loses his mind. "I'll show them all. I'll open my own arcade!!" Gotta love it.

[Flack]

Maybe TRON was one of those, "guess you had to be there" things. I didn't think that it was but maybe so. I was 9 when TRON came out, so the idea of the programs and cycles inside of computers having identities and acting like real people seemed exciting to me. Plus the graphics at the time really put you into the world of TRON, and the video game just tied that whole world together.

All those movies that I mentioned, like Wargames and The Last Starfighter, played on what kids (or at least myself) were feeling at the time. Who didn't want to save the universe by playing videogames? Who didn't want to hack in and change their grades, or feel like the world was against them?

[SoulBlazer]

I know the movie actually SCARED me as a young kid -- I think it was the evil computer thing that did it. I'll have to rent the DVD version and give it a watch.

And WHERE is Tron 2.0 selling for $20????

I intend to buy that, but every place I see it at still wants $40-50 for it.....

[calthaer]

I don't know where on earth you're looking, but bestbuy.com, ebgames.com, circuitcity.com, compusa.com, and gamestop.com all have it for $19.99. The prices in-store that I've seen have been the same.

[Raedon]

Not all the computer ref. in TRON were perfect but who cares :D Love the movie

One thing I had hoped the 25th Anniv. DVD would clear up was the GRID bugs.. The movie just blows past them with a cut and I had hoped they would release the scene that was cut there.

[SoulBlazer]

I wish. I've checked my local Wal-Mart, EB, GameStop, Best Buy, Target, AND Circuit City and they ALL have the game for either $40-50.

I guess I'll buy it from one of the websites.

[Jorpho]

its going for $20 already!?

Aye, but last time I checked, you need a video card that supports hardware TnL in order to play it (i.e., at least a Radeon 7200). I hope this is one of those games that gets released in a jewel case and stays in the bargain bin forever...

I'm not very computer savvy here, but I've got a cheap-o Xstacy GeForce 2 knock off card that runs Tron 2.0 just fine on a 1 Ghz machine with 256 RAM.

Again, I'm not sure if that's the same thing that Jorpho mentioned, but I thought I'd throw that in.

/hijack

Really? Any idea how much that card was worth? (I gather things like that aren't made in PCI form anymore.)

[calthaer]

I guess I'll buy it from one of the websites.

I believe that with some of those (I know you can with Best Buy) you can choose "local pick-up" when ordering from the website instead of paying for shipping. That way you can get it from your local store for $20.

[SoulBlazer]

I did'nt know that. Thanks! :D