TODAY I WATCHED TRON :: Instead of Finishing New Website
November 30th, 2008 — 10:03 pmI was planning to have my new site all done and premiered by the end of the day today, but it is not to be this week, I don’t think. It will probably be in the next few days, and definitely the first of the new weekly DHARBIN! strip installments will start a week from tomorrow, Monday December 8. I now have 2 strips in the can, so if I can get another one done this week I’ll be a full 2 ahead by Monday, meaning it’s more likely I’ll be able to stick to a weekly schedule.
Contributing to my not-getting-done-itude was the movie Tron, which I watched today. This is a poor excuse: Tron is barely an hour-and-a-half long, I think. It’s also so dumb in the dumb parts that you could easily do any number of things while watching it, including finish a website design, defuse a chemical bomb, and land a pilotless 747 jetliner with the help of an air-traffic controller by telephone. But when Tron is good, it’s REALLY good:
Unfortunately, when Tron is bad, it’s awful. I know that this is generally the case when you go back and watch something that was amazing and innovative when you were a kid, but Tron seems to be almost laughably crappy.
What’s funny is that the visual effects are still pretty arresting–the problems with the movie are with the story, dialogue, editing, direction, and pretty much everything else that a regular movie is judged on. In its way, Tron paved the way for other visually stunning but ultimately terrible movies like all those Star Wars prequels, etc.
But visually stunning it still is, despite being utterly obsolete as far its technology goes. In fact, as someone who’s generally a little uninterested in computer-generated stuff, I was surprised to find myself on the edge of my seat during some of the more artsy scenes–beyond the drama of some of the chases, it was just how fascinating the scenes themselves were. The design of everything in Tron is extraordinary–it’s hard to express how disappointing this makes the rest of the movie.
For one thing, if they cut out all the long clunky pauses, the movie would probably only be 45 minutes long. For serious. As a matter of fact, cutting out most of the dialogue would help as well. As soon as characters start talking, it’s like the “plot” part of a porno–boooooorrrring. I caught myself repeatedly thinking, throughout the course of the movie, of how amazing it would have been if creative people with the same amount of artistic vision and excellence as the visual designers had done the rest of the movie. This seems to be the problem most times when art and commerce share the same cart. And for its time–1982 or so, I think–Tron was like Harry Potter, as far as generating a short-lived empire of toys, video games, and swag goes.
But I don’t mean to beat up on the movie, not that the movie cares or has feelings. I think if you stick pretty much ANY movie you enjoyed as a kid up against The Godfather or The Third Man, it’s going to come off as hideously trite and childish. I mean, The Goonies is great, but..
And what IS great about Tron is its look forward–remember that in 1982, the fax machine was still on the leading edge of technological development. Watching it now, in 2008, is wistful in a way–you can’t help but think of the people designing the look of the film, trying not only to anticipate the look of the future, but to also anticipate what their audience thought the future would look like. This is both a blessing and curse of all speculative fiction–once your speculation is proven wrong, your story loses some of its teeth, but gains a sort of otherworldly alternate reality. I guess that’s redundant, huh?
Consider 2001: A Space Odyssey. Speaking in late 2008, I can say with at least 90% confidence that humans are not yet turning into Star Children out past the orbit of Mars. Nor are highly friendly computers locking us out of our own pod bays. Nor has everything turned white and become incredibly, incredibly clean. But for me this adds to the story rather than subtracts from it. While it loses some of its post-Atomic Age this-could-happen-to-us element–since clearly it has not–it becomes somehow MORE fictitious, which improbably makes it easier to buy somehow. Plus it bears noting that 2001 was also a visually stunning and highly innovative movie, like Tron. Also, a much better movie.
Another interesting parallel between 2001 and Tron is the fear element–in both movies the bad guy seems to be technology. In their separate futures, self-aware computers align themselves against humans. This is a standard trope in many sci-fi stories, which is always interesting to me: that when people think about the future, they envision menace and strangeness; sentient computers which kill them or make them drive light-cycles or lock them out of pod bays. In the 50’s it was fear of atomic weapons and the world they had created–but by the 80’s it was fear of science itself.
This is especially interesting considering the surpassingly consumer nature of technology today. Today we carry telephones in our pockets which are barely larger than credit cards, but are more powerful than the most powerful computers of the 50’s. You can get one for as little as thirty bucks, and most of them play music, run complex programs, access the Internet, and on and on. If anything, science is more and more ubiquitous today, although I’m sure I could muster up a proper dread if I had to. But if you watch the eleven o’clock news, dread should be found in every nook and cranny of modern living, most often your home somewhere.
I’m not very interested in dread, although I can handle it if it is the motive force behind a great piece of art. Which Tron is not, but it certainly has its moments. The sort of early scenes in the computer world are like a primer on German Expressionism, although with the sort of neon-heavy sensibility of the early 80’s. And somehow, it’s beautiful.
I’m not the only one who thinks so, either–while hunting the little Tron clip above, I found numerous mentions (including a fuzzy trailer) of a forthcoming Tron sequel starring Jeff Bridges, AND this Tron light-cycle game.
Okay, that’s all I have to say about Tron. It’s fun to look at, but terrible. And the music–whoa! Now that I have that out of my system, back to work on comics and websites. Huzzah!
Oh Hi There! My name is Dustin Harbin; I’m a slowly-aspiring cartoonist who is even-more-slowly putting together a new site, and spending an astounding amount of time wrestling CSS, trialing and erroring this’s and that’s. Thus the image at (hopefully) right. Getting the placement and captioning and border and all the anal-retentive schmutz that sends my OCD into paroxysms of delight is a real pain in the caboose, let me tell you.
