AcousticMonster
Well-known member
I seen the new Tron movie today in 3D. I loved the original, but this one was kind of...meh. I did enjoy the retro young Jeff Bridges effect.
Tron is like pizza. Even "meh" Tron is good Tron!
JJ
Why were the visuals so modern then? Shouldn't they have been a representation of 1989?
Well, first and foremost, it's a fantasy movie about a world that doesn't actually exist and therefore can't be wrong. The "inside" of a computer world be whatever they decide to make it. I mean, it's all a suspension of disbelief no matter how it looks, isn't it?
But if a sensible explanation is needed, I guess you could look at the first movie. The 1982 computer world didn't look at all like a representation of 1982, did it? It was waaay more futuristic than most of the computers of that day. (Nowadays you could make the whole movie on your iPhone, but back then no computer around could've created those visuals in real-time like that. It took ages to render just one frame.) So I don't see a problem with a 1989 computer world not looking like 1989. By established Tron universe rules, the inner computer world always looks more modern than the era the computers are from.
Second, it's plausible that a man of Flynn's wealth and genius would've been doing his research on a far more advanced computer in 1989 than anyone else had at the time.
Third, Flynn was inside the computer the whole time and is seen as having some amount of control over it and ability to program and create from within it.
Fourth, a big part of the movie was about the programs created by Flynn gaining a sort of self-sufficiency and evolving on their own into something more sophisticated than Flynn ever anticipated. So that would explain a lot of the modern visuals. The computer might have been sitting in the basement for 20 years, but the programs were evolving and growing the entire time.
Finally, we can assume that the computer world is seen as how it is perceived by the humans in it. It might not really "look" like any of that at all. It's just bit and bytes and flowing electrons in reality. What we see might just be how a digitized and dismantled human consciousness conceptualizes it, and is therefore transcends the entire question of what sort of graphical capabilities a computer would have.
JJ