I watched the 1982 sci-fi cult classic for the first time, and discovered that, despite not growing up with Tron, I’m just the right audience for it to hit right in the nostalgic feels.
It says a lot about the current state of entertainment when my response to nearly every new Hollywood sequel, remake or reboot is to check out the original movie instead. I had some tentative hope when I saw the first trailer for Tron: Ares, but it withered and died very quickly once the damning reviews poured in. However it did make me curious about the original film, overlooked at the time of its release but now acknowledged as a game changer far ahead of its time, for its ground-breaking use of CGI and its early vision of the digital world.
My only experience with the Tron franchise was the 2010 Tron: Legacy, which I thought was a bit of a hollow spectacle (I won’t deny the iconic status of the Daft Punk soundtrack, the reason to love this movie for many people, but I’m just not the biggest Daft Punk fan). It would be fair to say that Tron is likewise high on visuals, low on characters and story, but personally I found its retro aesthetic and clunky charm infinitely more endearing.
The story is dead simple, too simple you could say, set up with such dizzying speed it took me some time to find my bearings. Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is a lovable slacker and a brilliant software engineer, whose programs for new video games were stolen by Dillinger (David Warner), the duplicitous president of ENCOM. When Flynn and his two friends still working at ENCOM break into the facilities in order to find evidence of plagiarism, ENCOM’s Master Control Program (MCP) digitises Flynn and throws him inside the computer gaming grid. There, human-shaped programs live under the tyranny of MCP and its cruel underling, Sark (David Warner again), and Flynn must now survive the training that is really meant to have him killed.
By today’s standards, this digital world looks very quaint, a minimalist black space filled with neon geometric patterns and futuristic structures, rendered with effects that were once cutting-edge but look primitive now. It however pushed all the right nostalgic buttons for someone like me, with fond memories of countless hours spent in the 80s playing computer games at my parents’ work. In a way, this is a representation of the old-school digital world I loved so much as a kid.
More importantly, I can safely say that I’ve never seen anything like Tron onscreen before. With very few exceptions, we’re well past the point when special effects can evoke genuine awe, and I’ll take a distinctive and original vision over slick CGI any day. These days, I can be more impressed with the ingenuity of older films trying to get around their technical limitations. For instance, the trick of saturating the actors’ appearance is surprisingly effective at integrating them with their otherworldly surroundings.
There’s an intriguing religious layer in the story, where programs are forced to renounce their faith in the Users who created them, and there’s a blink-and-miss romantic triangle, but the movie is mostly a straightforward adventure taking you across a truly unique world. It doesn’t hurt to have young and charismatic Jeff Bridges as the lead, and David Warner is pure malicious fun in his dual villainous role. I’d probably say that Tron is too slight and flawed to be a real classic, but it has an undeniable appeal and was very obviously a labour of love.
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