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TRON (1982)
It's a good bet your mom hated this movie What kind of a dork are you if you don't have some love for this 1982 dork classic? If you were a kid during that first early 80's video game craze, this movie probably captured your imagination like few other movies could. If you ever devoted any serious thought as to what Pac-Man's existence is like, this was tailored to your sensibilities. Tron gives us a fantasy world inside computers, where programs are represented by the likenesses of the people who wrote them, fulfilling their tasks with the aid of tanks, motorcycles, solar sails, Frisbees, and creeks, anthropomorphized like nothing's ever been anthropomorphized before. Security programs do battle against intruders, hacking programs try to sneak or battle their way past defenses, and some programs are just jackasses, cruelly assimilating or destroying all that stand in their way. Despite the almost too-cute 70's sci-fi conceits (programs look like their users because there's a bit of their spirit in them, etc), these were pretty novel concepts for an audience that wouldn't have much to do with home computers for at least a decade yet, in most cases longer. The more computer-literate audiences of today will be more perceptive than ever of just how silly it all is, but unlike the crowds the original release of the film wasn't a very big hit with, they shouldn't have any trouble following the plot and they'll absorb the jargon effortlessly. They probably won't even think of it as jargon. Jeff Bridges stars as Flynn, a disgruntled programmer who's been reduced to running an arcade (the coolest-looking place that I could imagine actually existing in 1982, back when playing video games was a bit more of a social event than it is now) after several video games he authored were stolen, published and extensively profited from by his old boss Dillinger (David Warner). He convinces his old friends at the company (Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan, who definitely comes from the Bailey Quarters school of nerdy-sexy) to help him hack in and find proof of the theft, but the Master Control Program (which is getting to be powerful enough that it gives orders, scoldings and guilt trips to corporate execs like Dillinger) has other ideas and uses this laser thing to zap Flynn out of the regular world, and into the computer world, where, duh, he can do the most damage. Good thinking, Master Control Program! Bridges is insufferably smug like a lot of early 80's action heroes, and Flynn exhibits some minimal Neo-like superpowers because he is, after all, something of a god in the computer world, having created quite a bit of it. That world puts Flynn through a series of challenges that are remarkably like what you'd expect to see in a video game years later, and to no one's surprise, a few video games were spawned from the movie. Some of these challenges are gladiatorial, which is a peeve of mine but these mostly make up for it in their invention. There's a variant of jai alai which looks a lot more fun (and dangerous) than the real thing, lethal Frisbee fights (try as we might, my friends and I couldn't get our Frisbees to work that way) and of course the classic light-cycle sequence - ninety-degree angles have never been so thrilling. Other challenges involve the larger plot where the tyrannical MCP is getting rid of programs which believe in their users (i.e. gods - once we get into the computer world, all we ever see or hear of the real world is one line from a user on the outside, crashing down like the voice of god) and Flynn and his new friends (the program analogues of his real-world friends) have to find a way to shut it down. This means a lot of chases and sneaking around, as an excuse to explore the world around them. As primitive as the CGI visuals in Tron are, there is a lot of beauty and majesty to them and the human players (much of the time acting against blue screens, Star Wars prequel-style) are shot with an attention to making them look at home in the artificial environment placed around them later. This is one of those cases where the limitations in the effects are made into an effective aesthetic of its own. Conversely, the sound effects are pretty convincing though the synth score is all the bad things about being dated (made for good video game music at the time) and there's something amusing about Journey, ever the optimists, contributing a song called "90's Theme", blissfully unaware that they'd spend that decade as pariahs. Some of these screenwriting conceits work (programs don't "die", they get "de-rezzed") but a lot don't ("Who does he calculate he is?" "Oh my User!" "I knew you'd escape, they haven't built a circuit that can hold you."). It's even easier to understand why the small 1982 audience might have gotten lost in the plot when one notices that a few small parts of Tron look distinctly unfinished. Some nifty-looking critters called "grid bugs" are introduced for all of two shots, and their lethality is made clear, but then we never see them again. And the end shows how things worked out in the real world with such haste that one wonders if the makers knew just how much their audience wouldn't care about any part of this movie not set inside the computer. You'd think that now in the computer age, an update of Tron in some form or another would've been inevitable, but little has come of it. After many failed or abortive attempts to get a sequel off the ground, a new video game was finally released a couple of years ago, to little fanfare and acclaim. Few movies manage to be ahead of their time and already dated (e.g. the spirit thing, other Christian allegories I never want to see again) at the same time like Tron was, but a lot of this movie has only grown more loveable with time. There's more of a primal kick to the light-cycle race than any filmed approximation to a first-person shooter. This wasn't exactly an adaptation of a specific video game, but in this age of so many failed attempts to do so, it might have the best idea about how to adapt them into films - with an understanding of the relationships between them and the people who design and play them. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE T's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |