Its retina-burning visual makeup and gaudy SFX instantly made Tron the stuff of cinematic legend, but is Disney’s 1982 cyber SCI-FI deserving of its status as a classic?
The special effects have held up over time about as well as the original version of Pong looks juxtaposed alongside the latest 3D television. Tron’s dated look can be justified to some extent by arguing that the technology at the time was not nearly advanced enough to realize the movie’s atmospheric ambitions, which is true. On the other hand Star Wars opened half a decade earlier and still holds its weight visually.
The tired look of Tron can also be partly excused due to its central setting. Much of the action transpires in a computer world made in the 80s, and computer simulations tend to age very quickly and drag the movie’s that depict them (The Lawnmower Man, Disclosure, Hackers, etcetera) into early nostalgia. Representations of virtual reality one year tend to look dated the next. A quarter century down the track and, boy, how the times have changed.
There is a whiff of semi-alluring electro kitsch to Tron’s hyper-coloured mise en scene, and some respect needs to be given for its ambition. There is no escaping, however, that it looks pitifully awful, and it’s hard to believe that — even in ’82 — this was cutting edge cinema.
The story, clumsily established by writer/director Steven Lisberger, centres on hacker Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and the consequences of him busting into a massive corporate network.
The movie’s principal villain is an ultra smart HAL-inspired Frankensteinian computer program bored with playing the corporate numbers game and well past the intellect of its inventor.
The computer warns Flynn not to break into its system. Flynn ignores the warning and is zapped by a device that transforms him into the belly of the VR beast: the now infamous ‘The Grid’. Inside The Grid, Flynn is mistaken as a program — no human has treaded here before — and is trained, with other ‘programs,’ to complete in weird Gladiators-esque battles often involving bolts of light hurled hither and thither. Flynn and this cyber comrades are each given a disk that stores their learnings. They are told if the disks are lost they face “de-resolution.”
Tron arrived at a watershed period in computer history. The first IBM PC was released in August 1981, only months before the movie hit cinemas. Concepts like computer memory (one of the characters is named RAM) data and operating systems were far from widely understood and still in the embryonic stages of entering public consciousness. So too was the idea of virtual reality.
In this context, Tron arguably broke some new ground, or at least raised ideas seldom if ever raised in the cinema before. There’s no denying that the movie looks crummy, and this where overriding factors — an interesting story, a zippy pace, good characters, fun editing — should have come into play and clicked it into a higher gear that could have withstood the test of time.
Instead the plot line is ridiculously disjointed, the pace and tempo all over the shop, the dialogue a conflation of gibberish and interpersonal relationships laughably contrived. Lisberger’s rudderless story slithers like a mad mutilated snake in search of excitement and fails to find it at every turn.
The grating SFX are elements that can be excused, to some extent, by history and context. But, unforgivably, Tron is a dreadful bore. A movie that stinks now as it would have stunk thirty years ago.
Is Tron a classic or a clunker?
No ifs or buts. It’s a clunker. Big time.
see it
skip it
don't rush
12 Comments
If you are not going to include cool Tron videos Mr Buckmaster, I feel beholden to do so:
http://www.youtube.com/v/MpmoO4E8BeA
My sincere apologies. This post now has embedded videos, for your viewing pleasure.
IMDB PC? Was that a movie-reviewer joke?
Why yes. Yes it was.
Actually it wasn’t. I stuffed up my acronyms. Have made amends…many thanks.
I tried watching it just before Tron: Legacy came out in cinemas…. and it was too awful to finish. A lot of it (to me) was that, being in IT, it did not make sense. Part of fantasy/sci-fi is that there are certain rules you suspend/modify, and certain rules you don’t – as long as you’re consistent. Tron just broke them regardless of their importance, and did so in a badly-communicated manner.
The problem with your comparison to Star Wars is that it solely used practical effects, while TRON made extensive use of computer generated effects at a scale that no other film ever had. As to whether TRON was cutting edge cinema in ’82 you have to remember that it’s a Disney movie, not On Golden Pond.
Like many cult films, TRON is more than the sum of its parts. It taps into a time that saw technology becoming more mainstream and allowed it to be cool. TRON is a film that changed perceptions about computers, animation and film-making.
While the story labours, it has one thing that means it must be put in the classic pile; Light-cycles. ‘Nuff said.
I remember reading in the lead up to TRON: LEGACY that Disney had actually been pulling DVDs of the original from stores…and yeah I can understand why. Dated effects are understandable, but this things story is just atrocious. Tonally the films are nothing alike either.
It simply does NOT look “pitifully awful” – that is way too harsh and the film has dated far better than Lawnmower Man. Definitely a shitty story, but I really honestly believe it looks cool. Just look at that image above the article – I’m sorry but that frickin’ awesome!
I suspect too many viewers are failing to watch the movie through the original audience’s eyes. Being a story about new technology and startling new concepts, there’s an entire philosophy being presented throughout and Luke either hasn’t picked up on any of it or was too put off by what he perceives as being atrocious special effects.
Of course the effects don’t look good – they’re supposed to look accurate. If one were to remake 1982 TRON today, the same 1982 “quality” would be necessary as everything during the Grid sequence was the visual/CG representation of what that universe would have been at that time. In that sense it was hard scifi – it’s as close to reality as would have been realised had it been possible to see the world from within.
Naturally, TRON: Legacy is a lot prettier because technology has evolved, therefore the capacity to render that computer universe is so much more developed.
Effects aside, it’s the new concepts that were so exciting and that’s what makes the movie a classic. As Dave Gaukroger says, people now had access to computers, and everything from a simple “Hello, world” BASIC script to a business application was the opportunity for everyone to become Creators. Our work – programs – are presented as living, thinking beings in the Grid, and to these beings we were supernatural. We had become Gods. Isn’t that mind blowing?
In the meantime, themes of our own technological creation turning on us are explored. This may well have opened the door for THE TERMINATOR, WAR GAMES, THE MATRIX and who knows how many other stories to be explored in film.
And then the entire war was over freedom. Freedom of information, freedom of movement, freedom to go about one’s life without being dictated to by the nasty Master Control Program. The Grid had become a closed, centrally controlled system and our heroes were engaged in a bitter struggle against it. Did Luke notice that the bad guys are all “reds” by any chance and make the connection to the year the film was made?
Sadly, of the classic elements appear to have escaped Luke’s attention while he focused on the CG. There’s more to movies than their special effects and the more obvious parts of the story, Luke!
Oh and the plural of movie isn’t “movie’s”
Thanks for your post, as much as I disagree with it. It was fun to explore the movie again.
Great post Wexford.
Don’t forget Disney’s other great prediction of the future. They foresaw the Apple Appstore and iTunes! If you think about it, living in 2011 with the modern day Appleverse is the realization of what would have happened if Tron had ‘lost’ and some master control program had have taken over the world!
Anyway – back to being serious. I watched Tron ’81 a few months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Ground breaking film and well deserving of it’s status as a classic :_)
Awesome, you took my suggestion! I’m flattered. Needless to say I agree. Tron was trailblazing and influential without actually being any good.
While I enjoyed Wexford’s post, to his suggestion that we “are failing to watch the movie through the original audience’s eyes,” I’d simply note that the movie was widely ridiculed by its original audience too. The problem is to enjoy Tron you have to watch some bits with 1982 eyes because they’ve dated so badly, but simultaneously watch others with 2011 eyes so you can appreciate them as ahead of their time. That’s more mental gymnastics than the film warrants (though the light cycle sequence is undeniably cool).
Finally, another Classic or Clunker I’d like to see would be the most pretentious movie of all time, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. I’ve always wanted to write something on it myself but could never bring myself to subject myself to it again. But if you’re feeling game…