Have you ever sat down to watch a movie and realized, within 5 minutes, that it was going to suck, but you’d walked to the theater and your knees were aching and you just need to sit and rest for a while before beginning the clumsy trek home again, so you decide that letting your brain suffer for two hours is better than wrecking your legs some more? No? Maybe I was too specific.
Anyway, I tortured my self with Tron: Ares last night. I’d seen the original Tron when it first came out in 1982, it sucked then, and I should have known better, but over 40 years have passed and the memory had faded. Now I remember. Remind me when the sequel comes out (yes, it sets up a sequel) that I shouldn’t waste my time.
The summary: it’s a movie about unexplainable magical phenomena gussied up with a lot of bad technobabble. I can enjoy a movie that has magic as a key premise, but the technobabble kept bringing me up short, with a jolt: whoever wrote this thing doesn’t understand physics or biology, and for a movie that is ostensibly built around programming computers, they don’t have the vaguest notion of how those machines and skills work. It’s simultaneously magic + coding. Hated it.
What the heck is a “particle laser”? It’s central to the story, but it makes no sense.
Also, Jared Leto.
I shoulda stayed home.
Someone commented on the irony of releasing the movie in 3D when Letos acting barely covers one dimension.
The original Tron was not a good film, but at least it had Jeff Bridges and David Warner and historically groundbreaking CGI, so it retains some nostalgic value to me. Tron: Legacy showed that you could get Jeff Bridges back, add Michael Sheen chewing scenery, throw a bucket of money at updating the special effects, and still end up blander than the original. I’m not planning to watch this mess.
“Particle Laser”
well, maybe it uses wave/particle duality to shoot a beam of photons as particles rather than waves?
or maybe it shoots a coherent Bose-Einstein condensate beam of spin 0 particles?
or maybe the movie sucks and i won’t go see it.
It at least had a great soundtrack. But it was a movie that just kept going for hand-wave magic that makes no sense, and empty characters doing things in flashy color suits. At some point I couldn’t escape my brain going “okay, this is just absurd” for what was happening.
I did quite like the CGI for the 80s era Grid, though. Shame it was clouded by Leto.
As goofy as the original one was, I still like it. Legacy was a bit bland. I liked the Uprising series the most, and even then it could have used a bit of ACAB applied to Commander Paige instead of hinting at potential redemption. As much as I like Tron as an idea getting attention, I think the whole “into the real world” angle kinda told me they really don’t know what they’re doing.
Also, what I’ve read about Jared Leto.
The first Tron was nothing more than an experiment in what moviemakers could do with the CGI/special-effects technology of that time. The central message was “Yo, look what we can do with CGI these days!” That’s pretty much all it’s remembered for, and IMO that’s okay.
As for sequels, IMO the CORRECT trilogy is as follows:
1) Tron
2) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
3) Ready Player One
fucking morbius
Not to mention the plot has a serious hole!
The creations of “bad corp” (Leto’s “Ares” and others) are on a 30 minute time limit before they break down. They are trying to get “good corp”. Bad guy’s lab is fixed in a building while the good corporation is pretty much a mobile operation at their current scale.
Here’s a thought…DRIVE AN HOUR AWAY!!! Hell the other side of the city would probably suffice. They don’t even have to leave the county let alone the state/country. They’ll never reach you in time, you’re safe, and that’s the end of the movie!!
Years ago I worked on user dox for a DVD player application, so I had a DVD of a “Highlander” movie. I didn’t actually have to watch the movie…just use the DVD…which was fortunate as I had already been put off movies by “World According to Garp.” To fill the DVD, they included production notes, some of which were producer/director discussions about scenes that had been shown to a test audience. It was revealing how contrived and calculating making movies, perhaps particularly Hollywood movies, can be. It’s all about budgets, marketing, etc. Actual creativity like screenwriting probably plays a very small part in them.
@robro:
Well, yeah. William Goldman (probably best known for The Princess Bride and before that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) was a scriptwriter for years, and wrote a couple of books just on what it was like.
That ‘all about budgets, marketing, etc.’ is also a good chunk of why the general opinion is that ‘sequels suck’. A small film can get made mostly ignored by the upper management of the studio and do amazingly well because it’s being run by somebody with a solid creator vision, and gets a lot of word-of-mouth marketing for free. (Such films tend to vary in quality and can be great or horrible, but some of them are great.) The sequel to such a film, on the other hand, will have management attention paid to if as the higher-ups want lightning to strike twice, and everybody who can control the purse strings wants to get involved so they can claim they were the reason it was a hit. The end result will usually be a mess of mediocrity unless the actual writer or director has a lot of pull, because half the decisions are being made by people who only know how to handle money and think that makes them experts on everything that could potentially make money.
Disney, frankly, has been absolutely infamous for flopping back and forth between ‘amazing creator-driven movies’ and ‘mass-market pablum’, often spending years mostly in one category or the other before the company gets overly complacent and stumbles into pure pablum for a while, or some of the smaller subgroups that aren’t getting smothered by corporate manage to sneak something actually good out to the public to where word-of-mouth marketing can take over.
@4, at first I thought you were talking about a Harry Potter Movie.
A particle laser requires stimulated emission of particles which only happens in porn movies.
Reminds me of number one child’s reaction to Nic Cage’s dreadful Ghost Rider: “HIS HEAD IS A FLAMING SKULL AND HIS BIKE IS MADE OF FIRE!!!”
Maybe the movie just isn’t aimed at us.
Reminds me of number one child’s reaction to Nic Cage’s dreadful Ghost Rider: “HIS HEAD IS A FLAMING SKULL AND HIS BIKE IS MADE OF FIRE!!!”
Maybe the movie just isn’t aimed at us.
“Particle Laser”
technobabble
raygun? particle beam, electron bean, cyclotron gun?
does it matter – all dross
bcw: Please don’t tell One Million Moms that, they’ll try to get the movie banned…which of course will only generate more buzz for the movie…
jenorafeuer @ #10 — I hear you. I gather the reason a lot of bad independent films get made is because there’s money to loose…a la “The Producers.” I bet tax write offs…or “loss harvesting” as it’s sometimes called these days…can get you a budget. The other is to give some dufus with money a chance to rub shoulders with Hollywood types.
I saw the original Tron when I was a kid. Hardly great cinema, but the CGI at that time was spectacular. Never thought it deserved a sequel, much less two.
What’s next from Disney? The long-awaited sequel to The Black Hole or The Cat From Outer Space?
If you’re wondering how he eats or breathes, or other science facts (La la la),
Just repeat to yourself “it’s just a show.” I should really just relax…
Sounds bad. You need to re-balanace your chakras by watching a better than average science-themed movie. I recommend Real Genius. It’s got smart characters, a smart script, and most of the science in the movie has more plausibility than we usually have to settle for.
Ha ha, I also went out of curiosity (it was showing on a kinda-sorta-iMax screen).
Yeah it’s bilge. The first two I did find entertaining, visually interesting at least – even the much-reviled Legacy.
But this latest instalment is just rubbish, the visuals were technically good but strangely uncompelling and the Tron story/idea/lore is, irredeemably, a load of tosh. No saving that one, no matter what contortions on the part of the script writers.
So definitely stay well away from this one. As a matter of fact I was fully expecting a cartful of horsespuckey, in that it did not disappoint…
God’s death, a sequel to “The Black Hole?” What would that be — mad-scientist-in-big-robot’s-body coming back from Hell?
Like lots of folks, I thought the first Tron was memorable for the groundbreaking special effects. And given the time and the general public’s relative lack of understanding of computers, even the setting was pretty novel.
Tron: Legacy was good if just because Daft Punk. (Did it have a plot? I don’t remember.)
I saw the commercials for this new one, though, and the premise looks too absurd even compared to the other Tron movies. I have no desire to spend any money on a ticket for it.
Disney’s The Black Hole was my teenage introduction to the concept of black holes, something which had been merely a placeholder for some sort of inescapable empty vastness before then. The week after I saw the film at the cinema I went to the library, cracked open the Encyclopaedia Britannica and read the entry on black holes. That article alone was far more interesting than almost every element of that silly film; the only thing left for me to enjoy was the gunfight between the robots.
I’m betting on another Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones VI, Adventures Beyond the Grave.
Cursed as I am with a physics degree, I automatically started thinking about whether deuterium nuclei (being bosons as well as matter particles) could theoretically be pumped into a population inversion state before I stepped back from the brink of madness.
@6
As for sequels, IMO the CORRECT trilogy is as follows:
1)Tron
2) the Cyberchase series
3) ready player one
Indy Jones VI? Indy goes to Hell and hunts down Nazi officers to find where they’d hid plundered museum-pieces, then tries to get back to Earth to tell us where to find all of them? I guess you could have a funny scene where Indy has to outrun a huge diamond rolling toward him after somehow rolling out of its track.
That would be only slightly more ridiculous than Indy Jones IV and V. Whoever made those megaturkeys clearly hadn’t read the Book of Armaments: don’t tarry at 2, but don’t go on to 4, and 5 is right out! Maybe they’d figure that moving on to 6 would be okay since it’s a multiple of 3…?
notaandomposter: Never heard of the Cyberchase series. Does it involve Cybertrucks?
@26 drsteve:
Probably you are already familiar with Internet classic
Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics
@28 Raging Bee
Pity the makers of the Friday the 13th franchise, who had to churn through all those intermediates to make their way to #13.
“The summary: it’s a movie about unexplainable magical phenomena gussied up with a lot of bad technobabble.”
That’s typical of what they call ‘sci-fi’. Star Wars, for example.
@30 Reginald Selkirk
Oh yes! That takes me back to grad school 15-20 years ago. Around the same time as I began following Pharyngula, in fact. Good times. 🙂
@6:
I’m old school. The correct sequence is:
Neuromancer
Galatea 2.2
Plowing the Dark
Oh, wait, you don’t go to an overpriced cinema and pay too much for popcorn for those…
I was never into Tron. I watched the second one out of curiosity. Reminds me of when two hacker characters are in a hotel room in Mr Robot watching the movie Hackers and wondering what newer movies wold ruin poplar conceptions of technology like that one did with its goofy representations of computers and networking.
I don’t watch new movies in the theater. I did watch three streamers this past week.
VHS Halloween was not my cup of tea. None of the segments ranked close to stuff I’ve come to expect from that franchise. VHS Beyond was much better.
Kill List was horrible. I had to watch the ending again a few days later to confirm I hated it. Yep.
I watched an older cult horror film last night called Wolf Creek, which was really messed up but I liked it. What if Crocodile Dundee was a psychopathic serial killer? The real treat with that movie was the surprisingly goof cinematography. It featured the beauty of Australia with amazing landscapes especially in the Outback. I could see how that movie developed a following. A TV show too? Must be an Oz thing I guess. Aussie horror don’t mess around.
There was an homage to Mad Max with a car chase scene.
Uggh typos.
Fun fact! I ran over Jared Letos foot once. I saw Suicide Squad. I thought that was payback. Now I see he’ll never stop
I’m on a horror quest this month. Watching Terrified tonight (no NOT Terrifier) and holy hell! Scary AF! I like stuff like this.
@37:
Then this is the movie for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C6c7GJXr0U
Particle laser = They are not even trying. An average anime will be as good, or better. Try “Cowboy Bebop” (the movie). Good times.
Media: The Man In the High Castle?
Stephen Colbert:
“I Love You, Boss! | Trump’s Cinderella Ballroom | Why Are Republicans So obsessed with Nazis ?”
See 3.20 . Trump should at least stick a Hohenzollern Eagle on the arch.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=y9qBp7XevOY
Birger, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration
@15. notaandomposter
Except for the War of the World’s heat ray..
Horsell Common and the Heat Ray (dozen mins long) that was deadly and Musical.
@28. Raging Bee : “Whoever made those megaturkeys clearly hadn’t read the Book of Armaments: don’t tarry at 2, but don’t go on to 4, and 5 is right out! Maybe they’d figure that moving on to 6 would be okay since it’s a multiple of 3…?”
Know I’m very much atypical here but I actually really liked StarTrek V the Final Frontier here.. Gets a lot of hate but does have some really great bits esp the ending.
As for Indy in hell, I thought that was the last sad excsue for a sequel? In fairness
I didn’t watch it. Deliberately not.
@22. Raging Bee : “God’s death, a sequel to “The Black Hole?” What would that be — mad-scientist-in-big-robot’s-body coming back from Hell?”
Event Horizon?
@ ^ See but WARNING : SPOILERS :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_(film)
Plus there’s the trailer here – Event Horizon (1997) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers – under 3 mins length.
Oh and the Event Horizon ‘Hell’ Scenes here – gory and mutilation, horror & uh, very B-grade movie WARNING.
PS. Ah but wait almost forgot there’s also Doom too & that definitely has, sorta, kinda, robots plus / back from / in hell, Phobos & Diemos in it .. albeit its a classic old computer game :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)
Except ..oh yeah, that’s right, they actually made a movie outta that as well :
Again WARNING : SPOILERS :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(film)
Plus the Doom movie trailer here FWIW – 1 min 19 secs mins long.
Yes, but enough about politics.
John Morales @ 41
Thanks, but if I understand the concept it refers to charged particles.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a lot of speculation about various beam weapons.
Lasers have stubbornly under-performed at long distances and charged particles are even worse. Even high-energy neutons from fusion bombs interact with the atomic nuclei of the air so the effects of “neutron bombs” fell off sharply with distance.
.
Ironically, the effect of thermal radiation from big fusion bombs was consistently underestimated thorough the cold war – the resulting firestoems would have been worse than expected.
PZ at all, if you have beer and popcorn, get some friends over and watch a good bad film.
Brandon Tenold at Youtube has a lot of suggestions.
Inframan.
Hardware
Fiend Without a Face
Yor the Hunter From the Future
Repo Man
Dog Soldiers (no, that is too good)
Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine
Shoot Them Up
Highway to Hell
Should be “PZ et al.”
Tpyo agnian
I have vague memories of seeing the original Tron as a child, but I don’t actually remember anything that happened in the film. Seeing that Jared Leto was in this one was enough to decide I wouldn’t be watching it.
Also, I’m trying to boycott Disney as much as possible anyway. The less money I spend that goes to megacorps, the better, IMO.
Lasers have stubbornly under-performed at long distances and charged particles are even worse.
So it would be a particle loser?
Hemidactylus
It’s great at its best but there have been some disappointments like, for me at least, Bring Her Back. Talk To Me was so good I expected better from that film since they’re from the dame filmmakers.
It’s a dumb fantasy movie. You didn’t like Tron, you don’t remember anything set up from previous films, so what made you watch this? I saw this in IMAX 3D, and I and everyone I was with had a blast. I hope my skeptical side never keeps me from enjoying thrill rides. Yeesh.
“Thanks, but if I understand the concept it refers to charged particles.”
Driven by a laser — laser wakefield acceleration.
From my link above:
“Plasma wakes can be excited by appropriately shaped laser pulses or electron bunches. Plasma electrons are driven out and away from the center of wake by the ponderomotive force or the electrostatic fields from the exciting fields (electron or laser). Plasma ions are too massive to move significantly and are effectively stationary at the time-scales of plasma electron response. As the exciting fields pass through the plasma, the plasma electrons experience a massive attractive force toward the center of the wake by the positive plasma ions chamber, bubble or column that have remained positioned there, as they were originally in the unexcited plasma. This forms a full wake of an extremely high longitudinal (accelerating) and transverse (focusing) electric field. The positive charge from ions in the charge-separation region then creates a huge gradient between the back of the wake (many electrons), and the middle of the wake (mostly ions). Electrons between these two areas will be accelerated (in self-injection mechanism). In the external bunch injection schemes, the electrons are strategically injected to arrive at the evacuated region during maximum excursion or expulsion of the plasma electrons. “
OK, so I finally got around to seeing the movie and the “particle laser” is pretty straightforward.
It’s just a 3D printer that shoots out material with such speed that it’s glowing red-hot in transit. (I don’t know how it gets the material to stop in the right place, maybe it uses magnets or something?) It looks like a red beam, so it’s easy to understand why a layperson would call it a “laser”.