"See, people say this movie has a Daft Punk soundtrack. No, this Daft Punk album has a Tron movie."*

July 24, 2010 12:28 PM

San Diego's 2010 Comic-Con International [YT] is so TRON-ed-out that it is being referred to as Comic-TRON. And to be fair, the new TRON Legacy trailer which debuted at this year's Con—with its CGI-powered young Jeff Bridges—almost looks good. But hype aside, for many the real star of the TRON movie is the soundtrack by robot-rock superstars Daft Punk. New tracks appeared this week.
posted by humannaire (56 comments total)

*Comment by YT user lukasvonbamber, which inspired this post.
posted by humannaire at 12:30 PM on July 24, 2010

*schizophrenically drools and ooos and ahhhs over new TRON promos and yells and doesn't click on them to try to save something to ooo and ahh over in December*

Seriously, if this movie is anything less then fucking fantastic, and god damn it it looks like it will be fantastic, I will drive out to Disney's neverland and shoot Bambi myself. I'm serious. I'll go animated.
posted by cavalier at 12:30 PM on July 24, 2010 [4 favorites]

I saw a Tron Legacy trailer last night, and it featured one of the grid cars spinning its tires, complete with smoke. Friction has no place in the grid! It might be best to set expectations low for Tron Legacy and be pleasantly surprised if it turns out to be anything more than eye candy.
posted by Burhanistan at 12:33 PM on July 24, 2010

It might be best to set expectations low for Tron Legacy and be pleasantly surprised if it turns out to be anything more than eye candy.

Like the first one.
posted by CarlRossi at 12:39 PM on July 24, 2010

> Like the first one.

The first one had the luxury of being released when digital realms were just starting to be grokked and appreciated by the movie going public. However much its conceit and metaphor worked and/or failed, it captured the imagination of audiences in a way that Tron Legacy probably won't be able to do. Tron was a way for people to try to perceive computer system internals relating to each other in a dramatic fashion when something like that hadn't really been done before in a mainstream way. Legacy is just another 3D IMAX roller coaster.
posted by Burhanistan at 12:42 PM on July 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

The original Tron is one of those movies that seems better in your memory than it actually was. You mostly remember the Frisbees and the Light Cycles and forget that the most of the rest of the movie was pretty cheesy and stilted.
posted by octothorpe at 12:47 PM on July 24, 2010 [4 favorites]

Can Daft Punk possibly beat Wendy Carlos and Journey for soundtrack excellence? What about the Tron 1.5 soundtrack, which was also pretty good. Or the videogame Tron 2.0 soundtrack (available through questionable online sources)?

The tracks on the linked page sound great. I'm really hoping they do this movie (and soundtrack) right. I'm weary of fucked-up shit being presented as sequels and reboots of things I love from earlier in my life. For once... seriously... just for once... let them get this project right.

And yes, I'm reining in my expectations for the movie, and hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
posted by hippybear at 12:49 PM on July 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

Legacy is just another 3D IMAX roller coaster.

And while I hate myself a little for feeling this way because I really am thoroughly tired of the re-hash of movies and TV from my childhood, and I'll be pleasantly surprised if the script is anything short of awful and the performances even marginally better than ludicrous, until somebody comes up with a real roller coaster where I can hear Daft Punk in surround sound, I'm going to be a bit excited about this movie.
posted by EvaDestruction at 12:52 PM on July 24, 2010

I feel worse about this movie now than I did with the last trailer. But then, that only proves that you shouldn't judge a movie by its trailer.

One thing the trailer does do is set the expectations of how real the CG Jeff Bridges is. In that last scene where he turns and walks away, he's got a bad case of uncanny deadface. But, now that I know that, I don't care

(..and here's to hoping that Bit doesn't go the way of Bubo from the new CotTitans)
posted by hanoixan at 12:55 PM on July 24, 2010

Is there an HD link for that new Tron trailer? It doesn't seem to be up on Youtube yet.
posted by delmoi at 12:55 PM on July 24, 2010

The original Tron is one of those movies that seems better in your memory than it actually was. You mostly remember the Frisbees and the Light Cycles and forget that the most of the rest of the movie was pretty cheesy and stilted.
posted by octothorpe at 2:47 PM on July 24 [1 favorite +] [!]

LIES.

At this point in my life, Tron reminds me the most of silent film, probably due to how it was shot (B&W with colors added later). Some sharp knife should put together a TRON 1912 a la Melies...
posted by jtron at 12:59 PM on July 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

The first one had the luxury of being released when you were 14.
posted by joost de vries at 1:01 PM on July 24, 2010

If you like frenchmen produced soundtracks, check out Irreverssible. The soundtrack is mostly by Thomas Bangalter (AKA, the dude in the silver helmet)
posted by hellojed at 1:07 PM on July 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

Is there an HD link for that new Tron trailer? It doesn't seem to be up on Youtube yet.

Yes, there is.
posted by hippybear at 1:18 PM on July 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

@octothorpe: My sentiments exactly. I've enjoyed the trailers for the new film, so I Netflixed then original because I'd never seen it. While I know enough about VFX to truly appreciate what they accomplished visually, I was much more surprised by what a horrible film it actually is. All I've heard all these years is wonderful TRON is, but it's poorly plotted, badly acted, directed at a glacial pace in the "real life" sequences, and has dialogue that makes "Star Wars" sound like "Kig Lear." I'm sure all of you for whom TRON is a vital part of your childhood will disagree, but despite the visual work, I found it one of the dumbest, least engaging sic-fi films I've ever seen.
posted by OneMonkeysUncle at 1:29 PM on July 24, 2010

Bring in the Logic Probe!

I give Daft Punk credit for taking on this soundtrack challenge. Wendy Carlos' Tron soundtrack is a real landmark, simultaneously beautiful and great movie cheese. And mostly really unique and original, as unusual as the visual look of the film it accompanied.
posted by Nelson at 1:33 PM on July 24, 2010

> ...it captured the imagination of audiences in a way that Tron Legacy probably won't be able to do. Tron was a way for people to try to perceive computer system internals relating to each other in a dramatic fashion when something like that hadn't really been done before in a mainstream way..

Building off of this, that's part of why there is still strong nostalgia from viewers of the original Tron (myself included) when they watched it when originally released. I don't know if Legacy will be brave/savvy/cool enough to mention things like open source, closed systems, etc. but I guess that's why they want you to buy a ticket. But remember, at the end of the day, the original Tron is a Disney movie. Disney's goal was to get people to buy tickets to a family-friendly movie. Everything else that came from it was extra. If anyone becomes disappointed at Legacy, remember Disney is still in the same boat.

With all of that said, it looks like Disney and the filmmakers are taking extraordinary care in the making and marketing of Tron Legacy which, for me, has not seemed to give the appearance of a horrible rehash of a well-loved older movie. With all the updated effects, potential hipness of the soundtrack creators, and public statements of how everyone from the original is somehow involved, if it's not an interesting story and an enjoyable movie, none of it will matter much. Which is why when word got out that the Pixar brain trust helped with the story, it gave me another reason to be optimistic for the movie.

Also, to reiterate what hanoixan said, if they can find a non-cheesy way to incorporate Bit into the movie, I'll be pretty happy.
posted by lowrentkicker at 1:40 PM on July 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

I hope Olivia Wilde's character is some sort of robot which can't display human emotion. Because, well, you know.
posted by Justinian at 1:51 PM on July 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

It's cool if you want to dress up Luigi but don't try to blame it on your kid.
posted by The Hamms Bear at 1:55 PM on July 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

Some sharp knife should put together a TRON 1912 a la Melies...

SQUEE!
posted by erniepan at 2:07 PM on July 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

If Tron Were Made In the 1930s
posted by homunculus at 2:11 PM on July 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

I saw a Tron Legacy trailer last night, and it featured one of the grid cars spinning its tires, complete with smoke. Friction has no place in the grid! It might be best to set expectations low for Tron Legacy and be pleasantly surprised if it turns out to be anything more than eye candy.

Yeah, if anything they're going to overdo the effects. One of the things that made the first TRON great was it's simplicity, and granted that was partialy because of the limitations of what they could produce but it still made sense in the context of that type of world.
posted by P.o.B. at 2:12 PM on July 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

If you had an extra 35 grand laying around you could have picked up a real working TRON Lightcycle.

(I'm assuming it doesn't produce a wall of light though.)
posted by P.o.B. at 2:25 PM on July 24, 2010

I saw a Tron Legacy trailer last night, and it featured one of the grid cars spinning its tires, complete with smoke. Friction has no place in the grid!

I know, right, and I hate it when we hear the spaceships exploding in Star Wars. Don't these people know that sound doesn't move through a vacuum?!?!
posted by Omon Ra at 2:26 PM on July 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

I agree that the first trailer made the movie look a lot more interesting than this one. But, as for this:

I saw a Tron Legacy trailer last night, and it featured one of the grid cars spinning its tires, complete with smoke. Friction has no place in the grid!

I don't know. The computer world is a representation of what the users programmed right? Video games when tron came out were all vector and simple. Now we have texture maps and shadow effects, and physics engines that account for gravity and friction. The movie may suck or it may be great, but it seems like a plus that the in-game world would advance with the advancement of game design.
posted by willnot at 2:31 PM on July 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

I know, right, and I hate it when we hear the spaceships exploding in Star Wars. Don't these people know that sound doesn't move through a vacuum?!?!

I think it's a fair statement though. We're talking about an aesthetic of that world. People want to see TRON. Not TRrransformers2ON.
posted by P.o.B. at 2:33 PM on July 24, 2010

> We're talking about an aesthetic of that world. People want to see TRON. Not TRrransformers2ON.

That was exactly my point, thank you. The knee jerk snarker who resorted to hyperbole missed it.
posted by Burhanistan at 2:35 PM on July 24, 2010

A few of my screenshot notes on the new Tron-ness (from a while ago). My main freak-out was about originality. I guess you have to guarantee as much cash as possible in hollywood these days, so my expectations are just way out of whack.
posted by circular at 2:48 PM on July 24, 2010

I think if they really try they could probably squeeze a little more teal and orange into this movie. Somewhere.
posted by Justinian at 2:54 PM on July 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

Man, circular, all you need on those screenshots are a few cum dribbles coming out of the actresses' mouths (in dayglo orange, of course) and you'd be Perez Hiltron.

I know what bothers me about Tron Legacy now. The original Tron movie sucked. It's awful; seriously, go watch it again and try to not turn the dialog down. But there was this beautiful thing in that awful movie, the art direction, the soundtrack, the sheer novelty of it. It's a great work of imaginative art. I don't think there's any way to replicate that today, I don't think a new Tron movie will make people gawp and say "wow, that's really original and interesting". Without the imaginative art, all that's going to be left is the crappy movie part.
posted by Nelson at 3:03 PM on July 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yes, there is.

Sweet, thanks.

Btw, I never saw Tron in the theater. I found it in the VHS bin at my local library, when my sister and I would go and watch movies there when we were little (We saw the whole starwars series that way, many times) It didn't "mean" all that much to me, but the 3d graphics were kind of cool. So what if it's a "3D imax roller coaster"? What's wrong with that?
posted by delmoi at 3:23 PM on July 24, 2010

What was awesome about the original Tron was that it didn't play down to its audience's intelligence. It presented a world which the geek demographic knew well, and did it without being insulting or really abandoning sense. It used computer terminology in a way which made sense to both those in and out of the know. It wasn't brilliant, but it didn't pander, and that's why so many of us loved it back then.

Yes, I've watched it recently. (In the past month, actually.) And it's not as awesome as it was when I saw it with my young teenage mind. But it still struck me as very intelligent writing, overall.

I hope the new movie lives up to that, but I'm not holding my breath.
posted by hippybear at 3:24 PM on July 24, 2010

> So what if it's a "3D imax roller coaster"? What's wrong with that?

There's nothing really inherently "wrong" with that. But if you're looking for an interesting story and an imaginal world that can actually inspire new directions of thought then it's a dead end. The main thing it will offer is ever escalating levels of sensory bombardment.
posted by Burhanistan at 3:30 PM on July 24, 2010

You mostly remember the Frisbees and the Light Cycles

*YES*

...and forget that the most of the rest of the movie was pretty cheesy and stilted.

*NO* *NO* *NO* *NO* *NO* *NO* *NO* *NO*
posted by Evilspork at 4:59 PM on July 24, 2010 [3 favorites]

It's like someone told Daft Punk to forget their aesthetic and make typical movie music. I guess it's a bit more technical than typical soundtrack strings, but it sounds pretty boring to me.

As for Tron at least it had a storyline with characters. Most movies I've seen lately are really weird the way there's nothing but scene after scene of Huge Action. (I'm thinking of A-Team and Inception.) I guess it's just me but I hate that style. Even old action movies weren't like that (Dirty Harry, Die Hard, but I guess Terminator was always in that style.)

Nonetheless I'm really looking forward to Tron, and I hope I have the $20 to see it when it comes out.
posted by nervousfritz at 5:16 PM on July 24, 2010

Too many and not enough of you are looking at Tron (1982) through rose colored glasses.

Having said that, the original film is awesome. NYEH.
posted by cavalier at 5:27 PM on July 24, 2010

Wendy Carlos is the shit - I mean that in the best possible way (go get a copy of Beauty In The Beast, if you can find it).

It's hard not to draw some geek correspondence between Daft Punk's obsessive face-masking and Wendy Carlos' gender reassignment. Something about hiding real intent, or transforming a very pedestrian circumstance -
posted by newdaddy at 6:03 PM on July 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

if they can find a non-cheesy way to incorporate Bit into the movie, I'll be pretty happy.

*YES* *YES* *YES* *YES* *YES*
posted by jtron at 6:35 PM on July 24, 2010

Although Bit was really tri-state, no? *YES*, *NO*... and silent.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 7:19 PM on July 24, 2010

So is the soundtrack just going to be samples from other movie soundtracks run through a filter?
posted by empath at 7:35 PM on July 24, 2010

The original Tron is one of those movies that seems better in your memory than it actually was.

Marginally. But I remembered it being *awesome*. I expected a re-view to reveal it to be terrible, and it wasn't, by a long shot. Cheesy? Yes, it's Disney. But the surprise was how *good* it actually is. Other fondly remembered things from that era, not so much.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 7:46 PM on July 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

ComiCon is overexposed, but the awesome part is, even tho overexposed and yesterday's news and over and done, you still need connections that have connections to get tix.

Super heroes and artistic graphic novels are here, and in the forefront. Comics are now the Homeric epics of modern american culture, the new pantheon Americans base their morals and culture on in a post-christian world.

The geek shall inherit the earth...
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:41 PM on July 24, 2010

I saw a Tron Legacy trailer last night, and it featured one of the grid cars spinning its tires, complete with smoke. Friction has no place in the grid!

If the grid didn't have friction, the lightcycles would just spin and spin and spin their sad wheels and never go anywhere, and all the programs would fall down on their electronic bottoms every time they tried to take a step.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:14 PM on July 24, 2010 [7 favorites]

Daft Punk should tackle the Doctor Who theme next.
posted by cazoo at 11:32 PM on July 24, 2010

If the movie is nothing but eye candy, I'm alright with that. I'm going to be there with bells on for the first showings of this.

I'm a big fan of the first one, even though I know full well that it is not what you would call a good movie. I was 9 when it came out. At nine years old in 1982, one of my favorite things to do was play video games at the corner arcade. When I could, I'd snag time on the Apple II at school and dreamed of the day we could get our own computer at home. Tron tapped into that target market quite well. It didn't hurt that it had one of the best arcade games of all time as a marketing tie-in. I saw it three times in one week at the theater up the street. (Bonus points: the theater was running it as a double feature with Star Trek II. That was a freaking awesome week.) The Tron world was a great fantasy place for kids like me. The effects were pretty spectacular for their time. When it came out on DVD, I snagged it right away, and once in a while I turn all the lights in the house off, turn the surround sound up, and sink back into that escape that never got old for me.

Tron: Legacy can't recapture the same wonder that the original Tron did, but I don't think that's the point. It's been nearly 30 years since the original was released, and now they're getting a chance to re-do the movie with the CGI tech that's available now. (On the first trailer they released, if you watch it in HD, you can see the gauges on the bike working. In 1982, it was a miracle just to get bikes computer animated at all.) While it's going to make a bunch of money, it's not so much about the younger audience that's going to see a pretty movie. It's going to be more about the people who enjoyed it the first time around. I don't think this is destined to be a great movie. But if it's fun, if it's eye candy, then I'm good. (Damn, the new Recognizers are badass.)
posted by azpenguin at 12:45 AM on July 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

(Bonus points: the theater was running it as a double feature with Star Trek II. That was a freaking awesome week.)

Tron and KHAAAAAAAN! Two great tastes that taste great together.

But yeah, the bits and pieces of the Daft Punk soundtrack I've heard have me thinking "I wonder where they got THAT sample from?" Now a DEVO soundtrack would've been awesome (if Mark Mothersbaugh could restrain his movie scoring instincts and stick to the DEVO sound).
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:02 AM on July 25, 2010

Super heroes and artistic graphic novels are here, and in the forefront. Comics are now the Homeric epics of modern american culture, the new pantheon Americans base their morals and culture on in a post-christian world.

You know, I love comics, I write comics, but let's keep this real here, for real. Comics are now the R&D projects that Hollywood bases its popcorn movies on. Hellboy is great, but Hellboy is not The Odyssey.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:39 AM on July 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

Nope. Hellboy is Atomic Robo. Or, uh, reverse that.
posted by P.o.B. at 7:11 AM on July 25, 2010

We had a deal, Kyle: "Although Bit was really tri-state, no? *YES*, *NO*... and silent."

I remember my freshman CS professor pointing that error out in class back when the movie came out.
posted by octothorpe at 7:50 AM on July 25, 2010

pics
posted by wallstreet1929 at 11:14 AM on July 25, 2010

I think a good deal of Tron's success was down to the aesthetic chops of Jean Giraud - the new team have been canny in hiring Giraud's brilliant protégé Sylvain Despretz so I think they know what they're after.
posted by specialbrew at 12:37 PM on July 25, 2010

Daft Punk should tackle the Doctor Who theme next.

Might want to check out the Orbital version.

I am so pumped to see the next Daft Punk tour.
posted by pashdown at 9:36 PM on July 25, 2010

Heh, I saw a comment on Youtube that went something along the lines of "This Tron movie doesn't have a Daft Punk soundtrack, this Daft Punk soundtrack has a Tron movie". Much agreed and so very, very excited.
posted by Wantok at 11:44 PM on July 25, 2010

Someone didn't look at this post's title.
posted by booticon at 10:24 AM on July 26, 2010

Daft Punk should tackle the Doctor Who theme next.

Might want to check out the Orbital version.

Might want to check out the Timelords / KLF version.
posted by FatherDagon at 1:00 PM on July 26, 2010

Someone didn't look at this post's title.

Sark? Was it Sark?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:28 PM on July 26, 2010