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Tron: Legacy

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It is an adventure story, a tale as Jules Verne would have written. It was well done and is visually and musically striking, but lacked any larger theme.

I thought that the acting was atrocious, was anyone else bothered by that? Also, the "cherry lines" that the father and Clue liked to spit out got exceedingly annoying. The underlying theme of altruism, from the glorification of the son stealing private property in the beginning, to the father's mantra of "less of yourself, more of others" (or something like that, I out the line out of my head as soon as I heard it), was also jarringly offensive.

All in all, I thought the movie had little to offer, though to be fair the motorcycle scenes were visually spectacular and almost all of the women were beautiful, which I appreciate.

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Just saw the movie myself. The first five minutes seemed like pretty much an all-out assault on intellectual property. Other than that, I thought it was pretty good. Yeah, the father spouted some Zen B.S. about losing yourself, doing nothing in the face of opposition, etc, but I thought that was intentionally depicted as frustratingly dumb. Visually, great.

It does annoy me, though, when a movie relies too heavily on repeating key lines from early in the movie during the conclusion. This movie did that what, like, 5 times? Grrrr.

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Being a fan of the original Tron movie released in the 80's, I thought this one was atrocious.

First of all, the title of the movie was 'Tron: Legacy' yet the movie was anything about the actual character Tron, whom is revealed towards the end as being one of the 'bad guys' yet out of no where during the flight scene, decides that he 'fights for the users' and ends up sacrificing himself. The altruism theme was all too obvious so I won't mention that but I just got impatient for it to end and actually spent the last several minutes clicking through my phone...unfortunately I looked up to see the sentimental ending of how the father is about to suicide (and thus save his son and the girl) and they had to go with the whole 'looking back on old pictures' thing...4/10 for me. The only thing worth seeing this movie is for the effects.

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I plan to see it this weekend or next. Meanwhile here's my short review of the original film, typos and all, copied from elsewhere in the board:

One of the best SF films (although like Fantastic Voyage it's really scientific fantasy) is Disney's "Tron."

The plot is very simple. A second-hander steals some software and uses it to climb the company ladder to the top, while keeping the software developers down. So the guy he steals from teams up with two developers and they expose the bad guy. Only thin is the main action takes place inside a computer, which is utterly ridiculous.

Still, the scenes inside the computer are amazing. It's early CGI work, pioneering in a way but also totally unique. About 75% of the movie involves CGI and hand-painted elements int he frame (the actors were filmed in black and white and tinted or painted). The effect is a world that consists mostly of light. What's most surprising is that it's a very dark world. The contrast, a world of light that is dark, makes for unique imagery that has never, as far as I know, been repeated on film. Near the end, when the hero wins, the world blooms with bright light, but we see very little of it.

Elsewhere in the board I also called tron an "ordinary thriller with mediocre acting and innovative special effects, with a plot twist." I would like to revise that, because the acting wasn't mediocre. It was somewhat over the top at times, but it was pretty good.

It's worth noting that the star of the original movie was Jeff Bridges as Flynn, but the hero and title character was Tron, the program played by Bruce Boxleitner(sp?).

Lastly a bit of trivia. The Radio Shack color computer (TRS-80 if memory serves), had a command in BASIC called "TRON." It meant "TRace ON" and it displayed the line number being run when you ran a program. The opposite command was "TROFF."

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We just saw it. When I asked my wife if she thought that if we leave now, we could get our money back, I woke her up. It was horribly cliched on every level. It came nowhere close to the first TRON for originality or morality or character development or cybernetic theory or special effects.

D'kian: ...The Radio Shack color computer (TRS-80 if memory serves), had a command in BASIC called "TRON." It meant "TRace ON" and it displayed the line number being run when you ran a program. The opposite command was "TROFF."

The Radio Shack CoCo (Color Computer) may indeed have had the TRON/TROFF command but the TRS-80 was a different computer entirely. Though marketed as a "TRS-80 Color Computer" the CoCo ran on the Motorola 6809E processor, not the Intel 8080. (See Wikipedia here.) Operationally, the TRS-80 Models I, II, III, and IV were a different line entirely, with the II being an incompatible offshoot (8-inch floppy drives).

Compared to what computers were in 1981 and what computers are today and what the movie Tron was in 1981 and Tron today, the inability to get ahead of the technology curve was disappointing. Also disappointing was the lack of Cheryl Morgan (Lora/Yuri). When they said that Sam Flynn's mother was dead, it was a lowpoint early on. I came home to check and see that Cindy Morgan is alive and well.

In the original, the program analogs were more congruent. Here, beyond the obvious main characters, I was not sure who was who or if anybody was. In particular, I thought that Young Dillinger was the sycophantic program "Jarvis" -- and apparently, he was not...

As for the theft of intelllectual property, in the original movie, Dillinger stole Tron and Space Paranoids from Kevin Flynn. In this movie, young Sam Flynn puts Enron's OS12 out for free on the Internet.

Details aside, this movie was a waste of money, our $15 and the $300,000,000 that Disney spent.

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Also disappointing was the lack of Cheryl Morgan (Lora/Yuri). When they said that Sam Flynn's mother was dead, it was a lowpoint early on. I came home to check and see that Cindy Morgan is alive and well.

Well, Lora was Alan's girlfriend, not Flynn's (though she implies she liked him at some point). And inside the computer Yori hung around with Tron, not Flynn or Clu.

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The Radio Shack CoCo (Color Computer) may indeed have had the TRON/TROFF command but the TRS-80 was a different computer entirely. Though marketed as a "TRS-80 Color Computer" the CoCo ran on the Motorola 6809E processor, not the Intel 8080. (See Wikipedia here.) Operationally, the TRS-80 Models I, II, III, and IV were a different line entirely, with the II being an incompatible offshoot (8-inch floppy drives).

No "may" about it. I used those commands in a way which is what barely allows me to remain on topic.

Briefly, your link does describe it as the TRS-80 Color Computer. Mine was exactly that one. It came with 4K RAM (no, that's not a typo), and I got a tape recorder for file storage. At the time I actually wanted an Atari 800, but my parents insisted anything named "Atari" was a game and not a serious computer <sigh>.

Anyway, one thing I tried to do with the old computer was a simplified light-cycle game. I got it to display and move lines of two different colors, and to score a point when one line intersected the other or the wall (much like the snake games found on cell phones these days). But I never figured out how to manipulate the two lines at once.

It amused me that I used the TRON command while running tests of the Tron Light-Cycle program :) (barely on topic, I said).

Later I graduated to an Apple ][e. I still wanted an Atari, though.

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No "may" about it. ... Later I graduated to an Apple ][e. I still wanted an Atari, though.

I only said "may" as a conditional: "While you may have had a comfortable flight, you did arrive two hours late." No may about it; the flight was comfortable. Nonetheless, it arrived behind schedule. I did not mean to question your perceptions. I accepted that immediately.

To stay close to the topic, the early history of computing was reflected in your choices as well as in the 1982 and 2010 movies. The Apple Macintosh, the Atari-ST, and the Commodore Amiga were all superior to the IBM-PC line. But IBM-PC clones were purchased by the millions by business managers who knew "you can't get fired for recommending IBM." They were the Peter Keatings of commerce. The problem with Tron was that the writers failed to deliver the Howard Roark reply to "You want to make money, don't you?" What we got then was the usual anti-business propaganda.

At the end of Tron I, Flynn (and Alan, presumably) have the company with Dillinger indicted. How young Edward Dillinger came in and got on the board was not explained. So, we could expect but did not enjoy some entrepreneurial successes with great engineering, wonderful consumer acceptance, etc. But, instead, we have to the same old guys doing the same old things.

I confess that I stayed with the PC. I just got a Mac two years ago. This is being written on an HP running Windows. But I did so for technical reasons. I am a command line kind of guy. I had a couple good projects working in DEBUG. I wrote a fortune cookie in 22 bytes. When I worked in robotics, it was all low-level programming. Flynn's pal was, after all, Alan Bradley (Allen Bradley). With the robots, our work was on a Macintoshes because we were documentation and training. And I figured out how to wire the Intel 80x robots to my Mac to capture processes for documentation. That's the kind of programming I enjoy. My friends who adoped the Mac early were musicians.

For all of that, in terms of pure technology, the IBM-PC was behind the curve. But the clone makers won out over Atari and Commodore; and Apple was forced into a distant second. I think Dillinger won that round. Here and now, I'm not sure where we are.

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For all of that, in terms of pure technology, the IBM-PC was behind the curve. But the clone makers won out over Atari and Commodore; and Apple was forced into a distant second. I think Dillinger won that round. Here and now, I'm not sure where we are.

The IBM-PC clone makers were superior in price. The price reductions happened because the IBM-PC hardware standards were "open", anybody making a box to the specifications would be compatible with a huge pool of other hardware and software. The PC became a commodity with narrow commodity profit margins. There were always good profits to be had with the newest fastest hardware, so the whole huge market quickly moved way beyond what Apple (or Commodore) could keep up with. Apple is in the position of being the Bose Corporation for the personal computer market; they sell an incompatible product at a steep price premium to a small market. They can never expand their market share beyond a certain point due to the incompatibility problems, and (unlike Bose) they won't go out of business because of Microsoft's need to keep them alive to satisfy the anti-trust problem with the government.

I don't have much regard for the Apple or Bose business model.

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