Tron: Legacy Trailer SDCC 2

To tell the truth,

One of the few things I liked about the original Tron was the design work. It was very minimalist but it fit. And the traditional animation (the lighting on the costumes was rotoscoped) and computer animation they could do at the time fit. It’s one of the few CG films from the early 1980s that still stands the test of time visually. I can’t say that much for its contemporaries (1984′s god-awful CG in the anime feature Lensman). Most other films were less ambitious at the time and it was a while before CG really took off. About 10 more years before it started becoming the norm instead of the exception in visual FX.

I’m just not feeling the design work here…

It’s a lot like the design work on the new Star Trek film and the Star Wars prequels. You can tell it’s derivative of previous work but it looks flatter and doesn’t come off as well. It’s too minimalist-minimalist. There’s just not enough there and it feels more retrograde instead of evolved.

The original Tron looks more aesthetically pleasing to me than this.

The lack of the helmets on the characters in the Master Grid doesn’t look great. Even the redesigned discs and lightcycles look flat. I see skeletal vehicles and rings here. What — they could’t afford to fill in wireframes with polys?

There’s a lot more tech available now than what the original Tron had back in 1981 and 1982. Unfortunately, it looks like there another failure on the traditional design-side of that equation again… I don’t know what the training and background for a lot of film designers is nowadays but I kind of wish they’d stop using comic books, videogames, and other films (from 20-40 years ago) as source material and look more into the far-off past/classical pre-modern art as well design trends for the past 10 years.

There’s a lot of recycling going on in movies today and the repackaging doesn’t even look that good!