Welcome to the 80's- Fashion was constantly reinventing itself to be wilder and wilder. Movies used hand-drawn animation where prosthetics and puppetry failed. Music was at its finest, and rock was developing into a multitude of genres, including punk, metal, and grunge. The bad guys were real bad and the good guys were only marginally better, blowing things up to save the day. Reagan was in office, and Disney was producing live-action movies under their own name that weren't rated G. And you know what? They were pretty awesome.
During this time, Disney made a cult classic that would go down in pop culture history. Geeks everywhere whisper about it in reverent tones. One fan is so crazy about it that they made their own suit. And now, thirty years later, it's getting a sequel.
Now, I know it's probably blasphemy to say this, but up until now, I've never seen it all the way through. I managed to catch a good chunk of it on G4 a year or so before Legacy was announced, but up until then I'd only heard whispers of it here and there. However, I recently got the chance to see it all the way through, so here are my thoughts on the original TRON.
To sum it up as simply as I can, without going into character relations or anything like that, TRON is about a programmer named Flynn, who gets digitized by an evil, sentient program known as the Master Control Program, and goes on a quest through the network of his old workplace to destroy the MCP from the inside out. Along the way, he's helped by security/hacking program TRON, which his friend wrote, as well as a few other NPCs.
Now, the only reason I've shortened it up so far is because I must have written the description three frigging times before realizing that there's no way to talk about this movie without making it sound like an utterly mind-numbing pile of crap. It isn't, but you may want to chant the MST3K Mantra a few times before watching.
Let's cover the positive:
For its time, TRON was amazing. I mean, oh my god how did they do that amazing. It still is. The movie was released in 1982 and there are parts of it that look like they were rendered in early-90's CGI. I'm usually good at picking out how something was made practically, but for the life of me, I look at the first scene to feature a lightcycle and I'm stumped. It's really, really good on the visual end of things. Revolutionary, even.
It also went out of its way to try and make everything as unique as it could, from the visuals to the lingo used by the various programs that speak throughout the movie. The sets are really cool to look at, and there are a few ideas the writer used that I'm honestly confused nobody else has tried to adopt. The rotoscoping is amazing, and paired with the sets, it's really hard not to try and imagine what other kinds of places could exist in the network.
I'm not a fan of the programs' suits, but meh, that's just me. I liked the color work they did with them, though. Really cool stuff.
And now, the negative:
Remember the unique lingo I talked about? Well, it really doesn't help anything. As a person who knows a thing or two about computers, I personally cringed every time somebody said 'de-rezzed' instead of 'deleted'. The idea that software writers are gods to the programs they write is cool and all, but every time someone brought up their 'user', it was... awkward. Isn't a user someone who, oh, uses a program? Then, doesn't that make all of humanity a society full of gods, however imperfect we may be? I'm definitely overthinking this one, but it really bugged me. The acting is a little off at some points, the writing feels a little forced, and then there's the Master Control Program itself: Yeah, it's sentient and evil and capable of infiltrating and hijacking other networks... but why does it care about world domination? And how was it able to spread its influence so far, anyway? The internet wasn't THAT big in the 80's, was it?
The problem here is that no amount of shiny special effects distracts us from the simple fact that the plot is, for all its creativity, is... not really all that good. I realize that this was EARLY 80's. We didn't know a lot about computers, then, we were still making lots of new important discoveries and developing lots of new words to describe all the fabulous things we were inventing, but when you look at the whole thing, it kinda plays out like bad fan-fiction (did I just type that?). The movie is named after TRON, but for the most part, it's about Flynn. There's a romantic subplot that comes from literally frigging nowhere to smack us in the face in the third act (whoops, forgot a love interest for the hero...es!). And don't get me started on the fact that the MCP decided to use the enemies Flynn programmed into his games as security, because despite the handwave at the beginning it doesn't make any bleeding sense to me and I think they just threw it in there because they could.
If you couldn't tell, I wasn't really impressed. It's not a BAD movie, but it's certainly not fantastic, either. For its time, it was a magnificent achievement in special effects and everything was well designed, but nowadays, in a day and age where we know a lot more about the computers that are an integral part of our lives, it just doesn't stand up as well. It's a good shut-off-your-brain-and-watch movie, but if you like to think (and I do), you're probably going to have a few problems with this one.
During this time, Disney made a cult classic that would go down in pop culture history. Geeks everywhere whisper about it in reverent tones. One fan is so crazy about it that they made their own suit. And now, thirty years later, it's getting a sequel.
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To sum it up as simply as I can, without going into character relations or anything like that, TRON is about a programmer named Flynn, who gets digitized by an evil, sentient program known as the Master Control Program, and goes on a quest through the network of his old workplace to destroy the MCP from the inside out. Along the way, he's helped by security/hacking program TRON, which his friend wrote, as well as a few other NPCs.
Now, the only reason I've shortened it up so far is because I must have written the description three frigging times before realizing that there's no way to talk about this movie without making it sound like an utterly mind-numbing pile of crap. It isn't, but you may want to chant the MST3K Mantra a few times before watching.
Let's cover the positive:
For its time, TRON was amazing. I mean, oh my god how did they do that amazing. It still is. The movie was released in 1982 and there are parts of it that look like they were rendered in early-90's CGI. I'm usually good at picking out how something was made practically, but for the life of me, I look at the first scene to feature a lightcycle and I'm stumped. It's really, really good on the visual end of things. Revolutionary, even.
It also went out of its way to try and make everything as unique as it could, from the visuals to the lingo used by the various programs that speak throughout the movie. The sets are really cool to look at, and there are a few ideas the writer used that I'm honestly confused nobody else has tried to adopt. The rotoscoping is amazing, and paired with the sets, it's really hard not to try and imagine what other kinds of places could exist in the network.
I'm not a fan of the programs' suits, but meh, that's just me. I liked the color work they did with them, though. Really cool stuff.
And now, the negative:
Remember the unique lingo I talked about? Well, it really doesn't help anything. As a person who knows a thing or two about computers, I personally cringed every time somebody said 'de-rezzed' instead of 'deleted'. The idea that software writers are gods to the programs they write is cool and all, but every time someone brought up their 'user', it was... awkward. Isn't a user someone who, oh, uses a program? Then, doesn't that make all of humanity a society full of gods, however imperfect we may be? I'm definitely overthinking this one, but it really bugged me. The acting is a little off at some points, the writing feels a little forced, and then there's the Master Control Program itself: Yeah, it's sentient and evil and capable of infiltrating and hijacking other networks... but why does it care about world domination? And how was it able to spread its influence so far, anyway? The internet wasn't THAT big in the 80's, was it?
The problem here is that no amount of shiny special effects distracts us from the simple fact that the plot is, for all its creativity, is... not really all that good. I realize that this was EARLY 80's. We didn't know a lot about computers, then, we were still making lots of new important discoveries and developing lots of new words to describe all the fabulous things we were inventing, but when you look at the whole thing, it kinda plays out like bad fan-fiction (did I just type that?). The movie is named after TRON, but for the most part, it's about Flynn. There's a romantic subplot that comes from literally frigging nowhere to smack us in the face in the third act (whoops, forgot a love interest for the hero...es!). And don't get me started on the fact that the MCP decided to use the enemies Flynn programmed into his games as security, because despite the handwave at the beginning it doesn't make any bleeding sense to me and I think they just threw it in there because they could.
If you couldn't tell, I wasn't really impressed. It's not a BAD movie, but it's certainly not fantastic, either. For its time, it was a magnificent achievement in special effects and everything was well designed, but nowadays, in a day and age where we know a lot more about the computers that are an integral part of our lives, it just doesn't stand up as well. It's a good shut-off-your-brain-and-watch movie, but if you like to think (and I do), you're probably going to have a few problems with this one.
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