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Why I love Tron (and probably won’t love the sequel)

Jul 27th, 2009
by Robert N. Lee.

Put simply: I love Tron, still, because there’s almost no computer in that movie. This doesn’t mean what you think it means, maybe, if you’re one of those people who runs around claiming to hate CGI.

I don’t hate CGI. It would be like hating the stars. It just is. It’s made a bazillion things possible in movies that never were before, and yeah, when it’s used suckily, when it announces itself, it sucks. Same with all the old school FX tech they used to use and don’t so much, anymore. It’s the announcing itself, the drawing attention away from the movie, that’s the problem, really, not the specific tech.

I saw The Howling as a kid, and…you know, pretty cool close-in latex effects and whatnot, but when it came time for the big “two werewolves gettin’ it on and transforming during down by the fire” scene? A shadow. Cel animation. So obviously so, it looked like Bugs Bunny was making it with his hands to fuck with Elmer Fudd.

***

Old school FX processes have their devotees, the way there are people who won’t listen to anything but vinyl. I’ve had people say to me, geeks, in the past decade or so: stop motion dinosaurs are superior to CGI dinosaurs. Okay, you’re just making that shit up, I don’t even think you believe that. Nobody could. Half the reason digital effects were invented for movies in the first place was making dinosaurs. They all looked like shit before, no matter how anybody tried to do them, and stop motion was crazy labor intensive and thus expensive even back in the day when movies cost a quarter and you could use whips on crew or glue shit on a lizard.

I think something like 99.999999999% of the film and TV dinosaur material ever made by human beings has been produced since the mid-1990s, when the tech got cheap enough for about anybody, with enough hours, to make dinosaurs bounce around a screen at least somewhat convincingly. Not even the PBS miniseries with the weensiest grant has to be ashamed of making some dinosaurs and showing them, anymore. Even the creationists have convincing dinosaur movies, now.

***

Tron’s not a good movie. I don’t know any adults who love the movie and think so, anyway. A notorious flop, people stayed away in droves on word of mouth for one reason, really: it was more of the same with a few scoops of This Is the Future on top. Tron is Star Wars with a bunch of Jesus thrown in, similar to a hundred movies and TV shows after Star Wars.

The difference, promoted up the wazoo by Disney, was that Tron was about video games, which all the kids were playing at the time, and it was going to be kinda sorta maybe the first all-computer-generated movie. Tron is where it started, going on three decades of audiences saying “Yes, we know we like playing video games and you noticed, but that doesn’t mean we want to see video game movies.” They still aren’t listening: Raimi's making World of Warcraft. I spent a year and a half or so playing that game all the time, and I can't wait not to see the movie (especially after seeing Drag Me to Hell).

None of the acting's special, Bridges just seems stoned and bemused most of the time, any attempts at being relevant or techy or hip missed the mark. Virtually every moment of the film that doesn't happen inside the computer is torture to sit through. Plus, Journey.

And then you get inside the computer.

***

So the "computer-generated movie" thing was bullshit, you already knew that if you were a teen geek spending his Saturday going to see Tron in 1982 with five other male teen geeks. They rendered - at a cost of fity megajillion adusted dollars, on the equivalent of a 486 - about twenty minutes of light cycles and shots of solar sailers and recognizers and whatnot, and occasionally blue screened actors in front of them. Duh. Editing in the expensive computer shots just because, even though they don't make any sense in the movie, is occasionally abrupt and a source of humor for fans. (Hello, grid bugs!)

That stuff's still cool, if dated - Moebius and Syd Mead did a lot of the design, and it shows, but…only so much they could do, back then. There is a really nice sort of Constructivist/bold direction to the black/red outlines design of the recognizers, but for the most part…it all just looks like models. The light cycle races are like very fancy Cars of the Future demos of the period from a bunch of car companies, all dead, now. It looks airbrushy. That’s what people thought the future looked like back then, glowy and airbrushy.

Honestly, it looked like a Trapper Keeper cover back then, too. The only people who liked Tron back in 1982, it seems, were people who already knew it was bullshit.

***

What caught my eye then and remains my favorite thing about Tron, the more I've learned about it over the years, the more I watch it, is everything inside the computer involving characters, people. Because it is beautiful and singular and…just gets more so as the home display tech gets better. I guess we'll see about Blu-Ray, but I keep watching it - on DVD, on various advancing high def TVs, and it is still just so gorgeous, and not like anything anybody else ever made.

You can read about the process at Wikipedia or elsewhere, but basically: they shot the actors in their costumes in front of black screens in black and white, intentionally overexposing and overlighting, silent-film style. This was transferred to high-def film, and then teams of cel animators did Rotoscoping work, making all the color-coded computer-looking shit on top of them.

Everything, all the lines and pulses and death fades and everything that keeps you looking, every colored light pulsing over the ghostly pallor of these "people," that was all painted on top of the movie by humans.

It looks amazing, still. It looks better, still, than any other visualization I've seen of "living in a computer."

***

I love Tron because it presents a paradox. It is, in a sense, an alpha/omega point for movie special effects. It's the end of the beginning of CGI and the beginning of the end of more expensive physically produced effects. And yet the best points, and most convincing, are all old school, all an example of cel animation combined with in camera effects at its best, a counter to the Howling example I set above (the movies are a year apart).

I thought Jackson's King Kong looked better, even if the movie was Oh God Just Stop Making This Movie, I think dinosaurs in movies these days look a hell of a lot better. I appreciate the subtle ways digital FX and post tech has made life easier and effects - and I don't mean monsters and spaceships - more achievable on lower budgets. I'm good with that.

And yet, the loveliest picture of "inside a computer" I've ever seen was produced by hand, by hands, over hundreds and thousands of hours, late into the night, making mistakes, wondering why they ever did this for a living, wondering where to get takeout tonight.

You just can't make up stories in your head like that about render farms.

***

So I watched #sdcc and #tron on the appropriate day and saw the pics and crap video uploads and finally saw the trailer for real, and…what I was expecting. Now the whole movie can be that twenty minutes, only way better. I imagine the grid bugs will actually do something, this time, and it will be badass. Who knows, maybe this will actually be a good movie, as opposed to the original?

It doesn't matter. It won't be a great movie, there's no way. And Tron is a great movie. And you know how I know it's a great movie? Because a ginormo-budget sequel is coming out to a movie nobody ever wanted to see when it came out and nobody cared about after and reigned as one of those joke flop movies for years.

And then everybody who loved it grew up and invented the whole world overnight.

And the dreams we all had, they were dreams painted by hand, by humans whose hands hurt all the time.

There's a lesson to learn and one to keep in Tron, I think. That's why I still love it.

TRON
USA, 2002
Dir: Steven Lisberger

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  • Alain
    I had no idea they had put so much time in manually working over its look like that. Until now I thought that they'd just played around with camera filters and film chemicals a bit. I had never seen it on a big screen so I could never appreciate the effort they'd put in.

    In retrospect it seems like a rare artistic use of rotoscoping. There was so much awful, terribly awful hack rotoscoping back then, before CGI took over completely. That's over. Now, you get awful mocap hack jobs.
  • admin
    "In retrospect it seems like a rare artistic use of rotoscoping."

    Yep. And that's got to be a lot of the big budget on the movie.

    That's the whole movie for me, that stuff.
  • JanRadder
    My biggest problem with Tron was that apart from the special effects the story itself was pretty dull. I watched it in 7th grade not long after it came out. Our school rented it for the last day before summer vacation and I and my two dork friends were geeked out about it then almost entirely lost interest in it after about half an hour or so through. I never rented it later, though, so maybe I'm missing something.

    (Also, just an aside -- I grew up lugging vinyl around and still prefer it to anything else which is why I almost never buy or listen to anything but.)
  • admin
    Oh yeah, it's a crap movie and it died a deserved death at the box office. It's one of Disney's bigger What the Fuck Were We Thinking? blunders from their What the Fuck Were We Thinking? period. The Black Hole's a better movie, and *that's* a lousy movie (and another Disney misstep of the period).

    But The Black Hole doesn't matter and Tron does, enough so, like I said, that there's a sequel coming to a movie few people, in the grand scheme of things, have actually watched. The first movie bombed, virtually no one cares about the movie, but the small number of people who do care matter enough that a sequel's been a going project for a long as I can remember.

    The world doesn't make sense.

    And yeah, the vinyl thing was a cheap shot, so I took it out.
  • Chauncey
    Good points re: CGI. The best thing about that Dawn of the Dead remake was the relatively subtle use of CGI to augment and/or refine the physical FX. Nothing (at least nothing I can recall) clearly fabricated entirely on a computer to leave the audience wondering whether its all part of the movie or they're just watching a really elaborate screensaver. In that way, if no other, it represented an improvement in technique over the origianl movie.
  • David B.
    The best thing about Tron was a young, hot Bruce Boxleitner scampering around in that skin-tight costume.
  • I woulda had a whole different life if that had been my response to the movie. Sigh. (Not like I'm longing for gayness or anything, just...thinking a lot lately about roads not taken, way back when.)
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