Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

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Post by EricJ » April 28th, 2011, 3:34 am

Most of the reviews on A2:tS harped endlessly on the running jokes from the first movie (every review clip had to feature "I think we've been through this before...")--
But for an "artificial" sequel, it clones the style, rhythm, and cheesy made-for-TV look of the first film in such perfect detail, it's downright eerie.

(Although, of course, '82 was an entire year of unappreciated Cult Classics besides Tron and NIMH, also giving us Deathtrap, The Beastmaster, Victor/Victoria, Pink Floyd:the Wall and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.) :)

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Dacey » October 7th, 2015, 11:44 am

Sort-of-but-not-really update on Tron 3 (or what it would've been):

http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/featur ... k#/slide/1
"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift--that is why it's called the present."

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Ben » October 7th, 2015, 11:49 am

Pan looks so awful.

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Daniel » July 15th, 2021, 4:19 pm

Fun facts:


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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Ben » July 15th, 2021, 7:23 pm

I just realised that I have never run Tron in our cinema. This needs to be rectified before I am de-rezzed. End of line.

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Dacey » July 9th, 2022, 5:38 pm

THR's original Tron review:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235153927/

Tron director interview for film's 40th anniversary:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/j ... -interview

Cool stuff!
"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift--that is why it's called the present."

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Ben » July 10th, 2022, 4:34 am

Oh, I love that Tron review! Both for its charming naïveté of the time and its enthusiasm for the film, as well as the recognition and embracing of it as a giant step forward in the evolution of cinema and production techniques.

In the time since, it became sadly cool to knock Tron a bit for a while, because it was so new and different that audiences didn’t know how to respond and its major crime was that it wasn’t another Star Wars, so it got forgotten just how groundshaking, influential and impactful It was generally.

Even if it didn’t lead to an immediate transformation and industry swamping of CG effects like T2, Jurassic, Gump and Toy Story would only a decade later, it remains the film that *invented* those techniques, or at least created the tools with which to produce them, and inspired the talents behind those films to either break into the business or develop their craft.

Tron doesn’t get enough serious credit for dong what it did literally ahead of its time, and I was too young to really read reviews and pick up on what they were saying and just enjoyed films — and this one especially — merely based on the merits of seeing and responding to them, so it’s really nice to find at least one review that presciently could see just what this was and where things were going.

This is all kind of picked up in The Guardian piece, which is also great but obviously benefits from that 40-year hindsight. You do get a semi-feeling of how cool Tron was back in '82, though, for those that got it, how it changed film, and how exciting the future of it all seemed afterwards…

End of line. ;)

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by EricJ » July 10th, 2022, 11:01 pm

The personal PC had only hit the mainstream in '81, and up to then was only used by mainframe office workers (hence the MCP mainframe villain, and an office-cubicle joke years before Dilbert)--

So tech jokes would have gone over the audience's heads, and most of the hype pitched the movie to videogame fans, promising them "Being in an arcade game for REAL!"
Which, to be honest, there weren't really that many scenes of--Once we get the cool lightcycle chase (one of the decade-iconic movie scenes of its day), and the characters escape, it's a fairly straightforward Ron Miller-era live-action Disney movie, with only Jeff Bridges to keep up the humor. He does, of course, but little did we know he would soon grow up to be a righteous Dude.

And since disappointed word of mouth at the time spread, those of the day who thought Videogames Were For Geeks thought it was a Geek Movie, pantsed its few fans in the school hallway, and Nelson-har-har'ed at its disappointing box-office returns.
Truly a movie ahead of its time, but if it had come out in the Third-Greatest Movie Year of 1984, after live-action Disney started to get some mojo back under new management, it might have had the same unappreciated 80's-videogame-zeitgeist that "The Last Starfighter" or "Cloak & Dagger" had, both also misunderstood in their day.

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Ben » July 11th, 2022, 3:08 am

Well, yes, and possibly, yes. But as a nine year old, I didn’t know anything about computer culture, think we had our Atari 2600 by then but was still a few years off owning a Commodore 64 or Amiga 128, and I totally got sucked into Tron and loved it (possibly even more than Star Wars at the time) on the big and small screens. I visited the odd arcade (to play Star Wars, natch), and I’m still surprised it didn’t resonate more with that kind of crowd that liked both games and movies.

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by gaastra » July 11th, 2022, 12:34 pm

Happy birthday to the film that was banned from that year's best special effects at the oscars for "cheating" by using computers!

How ironic.

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by EricJ » July 11th, 2022, 4:36 pm

Ben wrote:
July 11th, 2022, 3:08 am
I visited the odd arcade (to play Star Wars, natch), and I’m still surprised it didn’t resonate more with that kind of crowd that liked both games and movies.
The game became an 80's-arcade icon, and lasted longer in culture than the movie:


The success spawned other movies to try and market themselves into arcade adaptations, like Krull and Firefox, and the aforementioned Last Starfighter and Cloak & Dagger, and even Superman III and Never Say Never Again tried featuring "videogame" scenes in their plots hoping to market the arcade or Atari spinoff.

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Ben » July 11th, 2022, 5:02 pm

I loved the Tron arcade game too, especially the really computery computer music. The Never Say Never Again scene was cringey even then, because it was so obviously desperate, but at least the Superman III game the villains play actually looked like an Atari game and even featured Pac Man sound effects, which kind of gave it a knowing nod.

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Daniel » January 19th, 2023, 4:17 pm

Tron 3 may finally be happening. Not really feeling it with Jared Leto.

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Ben » January 19th, 2023, 4:28 pm

He’s been attaché£ for a couple of years now. Since it had gone quiet I figured he’d moved on or it wasn’t happening after all, but I’m glad it is. Leto can be hit and miss — okay, more miss than hit — but when he commits he can not be bad. Granted, I’m going back quite a bit here, but we can always do with more Tron.

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Re: Tron: Legacy / The Next Day

Post by Daniel » June 28th, 2023, 2:17 pm

Evan Peters joins the cast.

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