Do you consider Tron to be cyberpunk?

Let's do another one of these... Do you think Tron is cyberpunk?

The majority of the movie takes place inside a computer and the bad guy is near the head of an evil corporation, but is that enough? The characters in the movie range from scientist to a computer programmer who owns his own arcade. Not exactly low-lifes. And the only thing that could be considered high-tech is a prototype laser in a laboratory currently under research. Otherwise, it's a perfectly ordinary modern-day setting. There's no breakdown in society, there's no massive wealth gap on display (unless you count someone not getting recognition for a video game he wrote).

So are the visuals of a world inside a computer enough to call it cyberpunk?

You can watch Tron on Disney+ if you haven't seen it before: https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/tron/4MFq1JeXEe1z

(On a side note, I'm tempted to make a weekly "is this cyberpunk?" post just to help grow the community and drive discussion)

17 comments

Yes. Absolutely. No question.

The story is about a little guy, fighting the big corporate power that already beat him once, and is trying take over everything. It also explores trans-humanist themes of person-hood, and AI.

33
- I have nothing to add buy my upvote. It's not the traditional cyberpunk aesthetic, but it's absolutely cyberpunk themes.
  
  5
The bets description of the aesthetic is vaporwave/retro-futurism but the stories themes are very very cyberpunk

13
Hmm...

On the one hand a plucky band of programmers hacking the system to stick it to the man is pretty cyberpunk, on the other hand nothing about the frame setting is.

I'd say it's a toss up. It's a great depiction of a decker hacking the matrix Shadowrun style.

11
I don't think so. The Hi-Tech low-life and corpo exploitation isn't really there. For example Alien, Aliens, and William Gibson's Alien 3 are great examples of survival horror squarely grounded in cyberpunk since the genesis and exacerbation of most troubles stems from unchecked corpo fuckery. In all three, everyone --including the Marines, the AP, the corpo agents, the merchant Marines, and even the fucking aliens themselves-- is being exploited by the mega-corporation.

9
idk I think it's a "no" even on the visuals alone. it has the neon-techy look sure but none of the grit and gloom of other cyberpunk examples. Honestly feels more like a highlighter world to me

8
If there's a term for cyberpunk dipped in glow stick juice, I'd call it that.

7
I'm a simple man ✅It's got future ✅It's got neon ✅It's cyberpunk

5
Tron was probably the first depiction of cyberspace in visual media.

5
Instinctively I'd say no. It needs to be more than just visuals. It's completely unfair of course, but I feel like if you can watch it on Disney+, then it's automatically not Cyberpunk.

4
- I think you could almost make an argument that Wall-E is cyberpunk
  
  2
The old one, no, it's much more classic fantasy than anything, the new one, kinda?

3
At the time of Tron, one of the most popular games was Asteroids, a vector game. It took pretty fancy computers to make vector 3D objects, and even fancier ones to make solid objects. At the time I was still en vogue to color the vertices as well as the sides (textures and shading would come later).

So that's how the Tron lines dayglow came to being. Also Wendy Carlos' score really sounds like she listened to the sounds of a game arcade for inspiration.

Yes, it totally counts as cyberpunk even though the whole digitization thing is fantasy. Though we may get to the point where we can print an orange (or even a whole human being) using nanomachine tech, but that's a different movie, and we'd have to deal with the whole transporter paradox whenever we printed a saved state.

2
It's a VR-themed fantasy

2
Loosely, yeah.

2
Nah, it's too family friendly

1
I think Vaporwave is a better genre for it.

1
It seems like analogue themed cyberpunk, but I'm not a punk expert

1

You've viewed 17 comments.