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Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

chiark.greenend.org.uk

11–20 of 129 posts

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#13
post #2

Wonderful! At the bottom he notes: "I’m sitting in the UK as I write this. Under UK law, I believe this should constitute fair dealing: the purpose is quotation for criticism and review, and this single screen capture is in no way an alternative to paying to see the original film. The film comes from the USA, and under USA law I think it similarly constitutes fair use: it’s for non-profit educational purposes, the am…

You really need to put this on an RSS feed! I wish there was a way you could get paid for views for this stuff. I will be sending people this link when they ask "why are you so mad about that terminal scene in that movie?!?!"

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#14

I was luck to know Josh Nimoy who is responsible for a lot of this in the movie, who has since sadly passed away. Josh took great pride in the fact that he was able to put Emacs and a bunch of Unix commands in a major Hollywood blockbuster.ed

FYI, (and sorry for the intrusion since you were a friend and I only learned of this person through this HN post) but it appears that you have used their deadname (which is an unfortunate term in this case).

Thank you for identifying them though, thanks to you I learned of a badass, and I regret the loss.

Personal site: https://jtnimoy.cc/about.php.html

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#15
post #6

As an aside the Daft Punk soundtrack that accompanies this film is an absolute masterpiece. I think it's their best work. It's such a shame the film doesn't live up to it's own soundtrack.

The film looks great too. It was such a missed opportunity.

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#16
post #6

As an aside the Daft Punk soundtrack that accompanies this film is an absolute masterpiece. I think it's their best work. It's such a shame the film doesn't live up to it's own soundtrack.

Listening to it now [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lILHEnz8fTk&list=PLO6S2qKFLc...

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#17
post #12

this makes me remember Trinity doing the power plant escalation hack in the 2nd Matrix movie the code apparently was legit, I think it was an SSH exploit (btw that movie is TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD)

I was in the theater when that first played. Half of the theater were cheering, some standing up. Many movie-goers were very confused. Yes she used nmap [1] and then sshnuke [2] and given she was hacking a power company it would not surprise me if that exploit worked in some utility companies today.

[1] - https://nmap.org/movies/

[2] - https://blog.doyensec.com/2025/03/04/exploitable-sshd.html

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#18

Now I'm watching this thread for the consultant hired by the film to show up and explain why each of those goofs was caused by the director explicitly asking for them...

I'm purely guessing, but I can imagine quite vividly how some of these things might have happened. Probably, a consultant was asked to generate a plausible version of some of these elements and they were quite careful in doing so. They delivered material (text transcripts etc.) to a graphics designer who was tasked to turn this into a cool-looking animated sequence. Software like AfterEffects doesn't naturally emulate terminal behavior and that's how the perfect word wrapping and proportional fonts were introduced. That whole animation was then essentially cut into the movie in post. There's no direct interaction between Sam and the console shown, only his reactions.

It's interesting that the terminal window running top does have a proper non-proportional font. This is likely an actual screen recording of a Linux system terminal pasted into the animation.

That whole sequence is less than 30 seconds packed with information presented on a screen together with unimportant elements that are borderline confusing to non-technical audiences. I would have forgiven the art direction if they had reduced the visual complexity of this screen layout into something more cartoonish to make the story clearer.

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#19

The funny thing about all of this to me is that, compared to most 'hacking' scenes in movies, this bit is wildly realistic, almost too good. If they were like "run upload_me" we wouldn't even be talking about it.

I’ll quickly create a GUI interface using Visual Basic to track the killer’s IP address.

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#20
post #6

As an aside the Daft Punk soundtrack that accompanies this film is an absolute masterpiece. I think it's their best work. It's such a shame the film doesn't live up to it's own soundtrack.

As someone in music, yeah, that was one of the best movie soundtrack’s of all time (not much like it in movies beforehand).

But kind of disagree about the film, think it was under appreciated. It isn’t a masterpiece, but the acting, the overall story, and the visuals were really good. And yeah, those dark Tron-visuals combined with the pulsing, digital daft-punk music really worked (at least for me), and when I want to get pulled into a different world, will rewatch that film.

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