Tron and on and on
Back in February I posted this blog entry about the oncoming nerdrush of Tron Legacy, waxing lyrical about a movie from my childhood and putting my heart on my sleeve for the sequel.
I said these things: "You have to be a certain kind of geek to get Tron. It's the fever-dream of every gamer, the Narnia of the Atari generation; the fantasy of crossing to the other side of the screen." "We were the first to grow up with (videogames), and we had an instinctual understanding of the idea of a gamescape as a "real" place" "Tron was ahead of its time." Earlier this week, I watched the original movie again for the first time in what has to be at least a decade, and for all the places where it creaks around the edges now, I still enjoyed it. I even rediscovered bits of it I'd forgotten.
And then yesterday, ignoring the city as it slowly turned into a snow-sculpture all around me, I went to see a preview of Tron Legacy; I got to watch the first IMAX 3D print of the film on an epic huge screen with bone-pounding sound. I went back to the grid, and it was like I never left.
There's a line at the start of the movie where Flynn says "I kept dreaming of the world I thought I'd never see..." and it made me think of a teenage Jim, scribbling stories in his notebooks, drawing pictures of Lightcycles and Recognizers, subsuming himself in the lights and sounds of arcade games. I never thought I'd see the world of Tron again, but it's out there, the humming neon landscape just over the digital horizon. Tron Legacy will take you to it. If you're like me, if you're invested in this fictional world, you'll see old friends and new sights. There's shock and awe, there's knowing nods to the past and definite looks to the future.
A new chapter in this story begins; I hope there will be more.
I said these things: "You have to be a certain kind of geek to get Tron. It's the fever-dream of every gamer, the Narnia of the Atari generation; the fantasy of crossing to the other side of the screen." "We were the first to grow up with (videogames), and we had an instinctual understanding of the idea of a gamescape as a "real" place" "Tron was ahead of its time." Earlier this week, I watched the original movie again for the first time in what has to be at least a decade, and for all the places where it creaks around the edges now, I still enjoyed it. I even rediscovered bits of it I'd forgotten.
And then yesterday, ignoring the city as it slowly turned into a snow-sculpture all around me, I went to see a preview of Tron Legacy; I got to watch the first IMAX 3D print of the film on an epic huge screen with bone-pounding sound. I went back to the grid, and it was like I never left.
There's a line at the start of the movie where Flynn says "I kept dreaming of the world I thought I'd never see..." and it made me think of a teenage Jim, scribbling stories in his notebooks, drawing pictures of Lightcycles and Recognizers, subsuming himself in the lights and sounds of arcade games. I never thought I'd see the world of Tron again, but it's out there, the humming neon landscape just over the digital horizon. Tron Legacy will take you to it. If you're like me, if you're invested in this fictional world, you'll see old friends and new sights. There's shock and awe, there's knowing nods to the past and definite looks to the future.
A new chapter in this story begins; I hope there will be more.