Movie ”Tron” Analysis

Movie posters are meant to capture the audience’s interest and reel them into going to the movie they are each individually presenting. Some posters do their job in catching the audience’s attention and some just don’t create any interest. Whether it creates interest from the audience or not mainly depends upon the visual aspects of it. These aspects include alignment, repetition, contrast, balance, direction, color, and font. Other aspects that most posters try to achieve that aren’t necessarily visual are appealing to the audience, showing the purpose, and staying on the right side of ethics. Also most of all movie posters contain the aspects of ethos, pathos, and logos.

To correctly analyze a poster you have to keep all the things listed above in mind. The poster that is going to be analyzed here is the Tron Legacy movie poster. The movie was released in 2010. It is always good to know when the movie was released in order to take the context of the time period that it was made into consideration. The time of which it was made is nice to know but not much more, so that the analyzation is pure and isn’t clouded from already seeing the movie.

To start analyzing the poster we look at the color the first. Color is normally one of the first things seen because it is normally meant to pop out at the viewer. This poster mainly contains the colors of white, blue, and black. There are many shades of blue used in order to balance out the poster. There is not much black in the poster besides at the dark points in the poster, that are mainly just really dark shades of blue. Although there are only a couple of colors used in this poster it still does a good job of popping out to the viewer. This is because the poster has good balance and has good alignment.

The alignment of the poster is all in proximity to the center of the poster. In the center of the poster you have a man and a women posing together. The pose is that of; the man is levitating some sort of disc in the air above his head while the woman seems to be intimately touching him. This makes your eyes focus on the man and the woman and slowly shifts your eyes to the disc that is levitating above their heads. Then your eyes look to the distant background that contains ships and buildings. That is because of the fact that everything is aligned so that the center of the poster receives all the attention. The poster also uses repetition to give it good balance. The shades of blue are very similar to each other on each side of the poster. So that the far left is dark and when you make your way to the center of the poster it gets light and then as you go to the far right it gets dark again. This is balanced out by having a darker center. This is done to catch your focus through the use of contrasting colors.

The colors don’t contrast perfectly but they do a good job of making the center of the poster stand out. Normally you don’t use the basis of one color to create contrast in the poster but in this case it works. The over use of one color in this case leads you to believe that the color is probably some sort of theme in the movie. Light blue is a good color to use when trying to capture a futuristic theme. This poster definitely has an extreme futuristic or science fiction movie look to it. Not only do the pictures in the background help to capture a futuristic look but also the font that Tron is in. The font used for the word Tron is a stencil font with blue florescent lighting on the border of the letters.

All this combines to give it a futuristic theme. The ships, buildings, and costumes that the characters are wearing all give it a future movie look. Now this look ties into what audience this movie is trying to appeal to. From the look you can guess it is trying to appeal to the modern generation. This is because the modern generation consisting of people roughly from sixteen years old to thirty years old tend to like special effects and futuristic plots. Just from the poster you can guess that movie is going to have cool special effects which the modern generation tends to like. Also from the characters looks and age, it makes you guess that there is a relationship that will go on between the two them during the movie. Movies seem to always try and create a love story in order to get the interest of both men and women.

The target age of appeal for this movie is the modern generation but that doesn’t mean it is solely focused on appealing to that age group. In this case, this movie is a sequel. The title Legacy underneath the main title Tron makes you guess from just looking at the poster that is a sequel. When researched you will find that is based off the movie Tron that was made in 1982. So in this case it is mainly appealing to the modern age, but you can also argue that it has an older target audience because older people were the ones that saw the original movie almost thirty years before.

Another major thing you look at when analyzing a poster is its ethos, pathos, and logos. This poster does a good job of appealing to all of these. Its ethos or in other words its credibility is shown in the fine print at the bottom and right above the main title. Above the main title you at the bottom of the poster you see Disney, which is a very credible company that is known for making very good movies that tend to appeal to the modern generation. When you look at the fine print at the very bottom you can make out a few of the actors names and the names of people who helped produce the movie. Most likely these are credible people in the industry or they wouldn’t put it on the poster at all. But, because the names are not easily visible it leads you to believe that the movie doesn’t have any really famous actors, actresses, or producers in it. This is not bad it just means that the people in the movie are either upcoming stars or are just not known very well.

Next to look at is the pathos or the emotional appeal of the poster. The emotional appeal is hard to depict from this poster. But from the man’s look on his face you see hopefulness as he looks up at the disc. You also kind of get the emotion of hope from the women by her stance. This leads you to believe that they are going against an evil force of some sort and they have hope of achieving their goal. Also you may sense an emotion of curiosity of what the movie is about and what will happen. This is due to the fact that the poster doesn’t really give you any plot hints. The unknown creates curiosity, which helps to get people to see the movie out of curiosity.

After that you should look at the logos or the logical appeal of the poster. The logical appeal is that it is a science fiction movie. This logic is achieved by seeing the space ships in the background and just the futuristic look that the poster gives. Besides that the poster doesn’t really have any other logical appeal in it.

This poster is a very good poster that seems to make all the right choices. It does a good job of choosing not to reveal any major plot points. If it did give away some of the plot it wouldn’t cause as much curiosity as it does now. Also it didn’t make any ethical stands which is always good because when ethical appeals are made it limits your audience.

The poster in general does a good job of catching the attention of anyone glancing at it. It makes your eyes focus to the center and then look at the background and wonder what the movie is about. It also does a good job of being neutral in the sense that it shouldn’t cause any common offenses to the normal public audience. There may be the occasional person that may take offense because of this poster, but in general there are no shots taken towards any group of people in this poster. This poster achieves its goal and follows the common edict of making a good poster that appeals well to the audience.