TRON (1982) Review

A tale about a human crossing over into a virtual world hidden inside video games, this movie predicted much about a rising technology using an amazing combination of live action, animation, and pioneering computer generated special effects. Featuring a simple story that’s owes much to Spartacus, the sheer spectacle of the unusual imagery made this a cult classic.

Turn on a TV set or go to a theater and you’ll immediately be bombarded by brilliant and unreal visions of people or things doing physically impossible actions in defiance of the laws of physics or existence. In a world filled with computer generated (CG) graphics it all seems humdrum today.

Rendered by artists using computers instead of airbrushes and paint, CG is used in everything from commercials to sports broadcasts (virtual 1st down lines, anyone?) with no way to escape it. Let me take you back to a far gone period where this wasn’t the case and computers themselves were still mysterious rather than ubiquitous.

The early 1980s to be precise.

Desperate to regain a declining youth audience in the late ‘70s, Walt Disney’s movie division was willing to try new things. While conventional animation was considered dead or at least comatose, a slew of live action movies breaking the child friendly G rating were commissioned. Among them were The Watcher in the Woods, The Black Hole, and the radically experimental TRON.

TRON would feature something new: extensive use of computer generated graphics. Remember, this was an era before the Web, before personal computers became household items, and a computer was something the size of a refrigerator or even an entire room. This film sailed into uncharted waters using unproven technology to make a journey into the fantastic.

The movie begins with a combination of bright shapes briefly combining to form a strange humanoid figure before revealing the now classic title. Dots of lights scattered against a black background resolve into a pattern that resembles the blocks of a city at night complete with traffic. Sure enough, this image fades into the real thing and we are presented with a relic of the era: a video game arcade.

For those of us who were teens in the Eighties, the cacophony of noise brings back memories of feeding tokens into video games, wrestling with joysticks until your wrists ached, and trying to get your initials on the high score. This was the high point of arcades in America, never to be seen again thanks to a little plastic boxes such as the Atari 2600 and eventually the NES bringing games into homes.

Two worlds are shown, one with a college age kid gripping a blue joystick and the world inside the game he’s playing. What are simple lines and blobs of color on the  screen become three dimensional racing machines complete with human looking riders. And so the iconic lightcycle debuts, the one thing that even casual viewers remembered about the movie.

For the record, that was the part of the tie-in arcade game that always beat me.

What are fun and games in the real world turn out to be anything but enjoyable in “the Grid” where programs are made to battle for their survival. A dictatorship is in place run by the MCP (Master Control Program) through his servant, Sark (David Warner). Sark is a simultaneously strutting and sniveling program bored with the business programs he’s easily defeating in the games.

If he thinks he has it bad, it’s nothing compared to what his opponents are going through. Crom (Peter Jurasik) is an accounting program bewildered to have been imprisoned for believing in “Users” by the MCP. In the cell next to him resides RAM (Dan Shor) who is the classic jaded soldier who’s seen too much. You know the private from Brooklyn in nearly every WWII movie you’ve seen? That’s RAM. His exposition sets a tone more serious that one would expect of a movie about video games.

Back in the real world, its owner Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is hacking his way into ENCOM’s main server. A large corporation, ENCOM is a stand-in for Apple, Atari, and Microsoft, by the way. Hacking was voodoo black magic to people back then, for computers were mysterious things beyond the ken of mortal men. Being strange and incomprehensible, it was exotic and vaguely dangerous.

Flynn’s program for infiltration is named CLU and it looks just like him in the virtual world. Robotically voiced by Bridges, he’s a more uptight version of his “User” and gung-ho to break in. Rolling around in a very sleek looking CG tank, his quest doesn’t go well when he runs into giant floating enforcers called Recognizers. They look more than little like the ships from Space Invaders made into three dimensional form.

It’s a lot of world establishing delivered unusually early in a movie. There is no delay or build up to showing off the CG graphics or the bizarre looking environment that the programs exist in. Instead, everything is shown right away.

Call it the Star Wars influence on science fiction and fantasy. After seeing that star destroyer thunder endlessly on in the opening of that seminal film, movies were never the same. I’m not sure that was a change for the better in cinema. Still it is an interesting choice to focus on the virtual world first rather than the humans involved due to the possibility of the audience feeling lost.

Strutting on screen is the current senior executive vice president of ENCOM, Dillinger (David Warner again). Much like his doppelganger Sark, he’s all bluster while secretly being bullied by the MCP (voiced by that David Warner guy). It’s the classic science fiction scenario of a creator being enslaved by his own creation once the blackmail begins. The fear of artificial intelligence going rogue inevitably had to be part of the plot given the setup.

Meanwhile, deep in the bowels of office cubical hell resides Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), a programming nerd due to his wearing glasses. Well, clothes make the man, right? Anyway, he’s frustrated because his new security watchdog program named TRON can’t be accessed.

Words exchanged with Dillinger, do not sooth his ruffled feathers. Luckily for him, he has a hot and nerdy girlfriend working at the labs of the corporation to go to. Lora (Cindy Morgan) and her immediate boss, Walter (Bernard Hughes), have just invented teleportation! Or more accurately, the ability to dematerialize matter, digitize it, and then reconstruct it. It’s all in a day’s work from their blasé reaction to the successful test.

Deciding Flynn has to be the source of the security problems at ENCOM, Alan and Lora head to his arcade to find out what is going on. Much is revealed, including the fact that Lora is his ex-girlfriend and he was the true inventor of Space Paranoids, the game that put ENCOM on the map. There’s a lot of tension between the three, especially between the men vying for supremacy in regards to Lora.

The only solution to all this is, of course, breaking and entering. Nothing says justice like committing a felony.

Of course the immature and dashing Flynn gets to go off with the girl for that part of the plan, leaving Alan alone in his dark cubicle. At least he has the classic line from The Day the Earth Stood Still to keep him company and confirm his geek status. Seriously, that is one sad looking cubicle.

Unknown to him, things are going far worse for the popular guy. It seems the MCP doesn’t take well to being hacked and that laser used for dematerialization happens to be conveniently lined up with Lora’s computer terminal…

One zapping later, Flynn’s journey into the world inside ENCOM’s mainframe owes a lot to the finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It certainly is psychedelic enough, though this time all the effects were rendered on computers. Trippy and dazzling, it sets the tone for the rest of the movie.

Dazed and more than a little confused, the unflappable Flynn finds himself flapped by this unexpected turn of events. Thrust into a world of strange shapes and lights, he’s soon made to feel at home. If home is considered to be a high security prison where the inmates are forced to fight each other to the death with Frisbees.

No, I’m not joking. They’re called Identity Discs, but they are clearly the plastic summertime toys we’ve all played with.

Hammered home is the fact that the Grid is a totalitarian world run by the MCP through fear and absolute power. As far as the ruler goes, he’s a grotesquely distorted face unseen by the public with Sark doing the dirty work. Religious persecution is the order of the day featuring oppression for breakfast and execution for dinner. There is no lunch other than a diet of misery.

Who knew that was what was going on inside the arcade games back then? I certainly didn’t. To think all those quarters were supporting virtual fascism.

Eventually teamed up with RAM and TRON (Boxleitner again), Flynn finds himself forced to fight to avoid being derezzed (killed). What follows is the big action piece of the movie showcasing the elegant simplicity of the lightcycle game and ensuing spectacular chase. Today we are used to helicopter like cameras swooping around for dizzying chase scenes only made possible through computer generated alchemy.

In 1982, this was nothing short of revolutionary.

Sark is none too pleased to see this happen and appears even more upset when Pac-man escapes too. In a blink and you’ll miss it cameo, the most popular video game character of the 1980s can be seen munching on dots on the surveillance screen. I still wonder how he would have fared against lightcycles since he certainly knew his way around a maze.

Something I appreciated about the movie was the effort put into detailing the digital world in the computer. Glimpses of an electric ecosystem, a city, and even a garbage pile all add a sense of a living, breathing world. Otherworldly is the best word to describe it with TRON being the most out there thing I’ve seen on the big screen outside of Japanese anime.

Also adding depth to the story is the ongoing theme religious belief in the Users and Flynn’s reticence to reveal that he is one. When the escape separates him and RAM from TRON, it becomes something impossible to hide when mysterious powers begin to manifest in him. These abilities are nothing short of godlike to the programs, though Flynn really doesn’t know what he’s doing.

While Flynn struggles to keep going, TRON is determined to contact his User, Alan. Alone the stoic program has to get to the Input/Output Tower used for communications. Only one problem: a city full of programs loyal to the MCP are in the way. A familiar face is his only hope if he is to succeed…

The final act is ready to play out. Can TRON free the Grid from the tyranny of the MCP? Can Flynn find his way back to the real world? Will Dillinger get what he deserves?

There will be violence, weirdness, plenty of das blinkin lights, and at least one mind blowing scene by the end.

Thoughts

This is a unique movie that reminds me of old silent films like Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari than anything more modern. While nothing brilliant, it is fun and very, very different.

The thing that strikes me about TRON is that it’s more fascinating as a production than as a story. It isn’t to say that the story isn’t serviceable, for I consider it adequate and maybe more of a tease of something greater down the road. Frankly, the whole thing is spectacle that was overwhelming at the time and drowned out the story to some degree.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Both the story and the making of the movie itself reflect an era lost, one where there were still exciting frontiers to be found and everything seemed possible. Warning signs of the end coming also factor into the script with an example being the scene between Walter and Dillinger. A classic confrontation between the old guard and young turk captures that moment when the business school majors took over from the creative geniuses that founded the home PC movement. In that sense, the film was prophetic.

The failure to capitalize on the wide open frontiers along with the trend of “selling out” later became the basis for the sequel, TRON: Legacy. It makes for very interesting viewing watching these films released 28 years apart back to back, I have to say.

Lest I forget, I should mention that the story is very much about the fight for freedom against oppression and conformity. Part of the MCP’s agenda is absorbing all the lesser programs into itself, forcing them to become one in purpose if not existence. In no small way the movie is a rant against becoming just like everyone else, an attitude still found in the tech world despite the rather obvious conformity to a rigid belief system of a different type. Such is the way of things.

A box office dud, home video was kinder and the movie achieve cult status over the years.TRON was influential in inspiring people to get into computing, not to mention the glowing accent movement of today found on home entertainment devices, rice racers, and PCs. Whole new vistas of graphics and design were opened up by the imagery of the movie, which is quite a legacy.

Another thing adding a futuristic ambiance to the movie was Wendy Carlos’ unique score. Best known for the Switched on Bach album (I had that as a kid!), Carlos was an innovator in the synthesizer scene so her stylings were well suited to the film. It’s an interesting endeavor that you won’t mistake for anything else. Fortunately, it is now available for download via iTunes or Amazon MP3 after a long period of being unpublished.

The movie deserves its PG rating and parents should be aware there are quite a few deaths along with some imagery that will scare small children. There is even a scene with gore, though it being rendered in glowing lights mutes it a bit. Other than that, there is no objectionable material, though some of the story line will only be understood by adults.

I recommend the movie for those interested in major milestones in cinema history, video game addicts, computer geeks (mandatory, in fact), special effects nuts, kids, and science fiction fans. Most other people won’t find it interesting in the least and will find it bewildering despite being visually striking.

Technical

The release I’m reviewing is the Disney TRON: The Original Classic Special Edition double DVD set. I’d have purchased the Blu-ray, but I bought this one week before being surprised with a gift BD-ROM drive. Thankfully the DVDs are very high quality!

Disc 1 contains the movie and a couple of extras with the bulk of the bonus materials being on Disc 2. If you are a fan of the movie, this edition is the one to get in DVD or BD.

Why? TRON was digitally restored, not just remastered for the Special Edition. Everything is gorgeous with all specks and flaws removed plus the audio was remixed from HD.

The bright and vivid transfer is presented in anamorphic widescreen preserving the original 2.20:1 screen ratio of the 70 mm Panavision format it was filmed on. Saturation and contrast are simply superb with everything sharp as a tack.

Audio is available in Dolby Digital 5.1 for English, French, and Spanish with subtitles for all those languages. The mix is perfect with the dialogue clear and separate from the soundtrack which does justice to the score. Surround is well implemented, adding to the atmosphere while never distracting.

The bounteous extras are English audio only.

Disc 1 contains two extras:

The TRON Phenomenon – A documentary made for this release, it runs at just under ten minutes and is the only bonus content in 16:9 format. Interviews with the director Steven Lisberger, members of the cast and crew, and their counterparts from TRON: Legacy give quite a range of views on the movie.

Adding to the fun are looks at concept art and behind the scenes of shooting. From Syd Mead’s original lightcycle designs to construction of the all black sets, we get to see the rather unusual environment that produced an equally unusual movie.

Audio Commentary – This rather loose and fun optional soundtrack reunites the director, producer, and effects men. Made for the 1995 Laserdisc release, you’ll get to hear some complaints about how the film stock has deteriorated which no longer applies. Like many of the extras, there is information duplication. However, this commentary is a lot of fun, especially when the group start riffing on certain scenes in MST3K fashion.

Disc 2 is all extras, all the time and duplicates material from the previous LD and DVD releases. That means 4:3 ratio content meant for older TVs.

Development – Broken into four sections that include an interview with Lisberger where he explains the influences that inspired the film, from Star Wars to Jaws. Also of note are early video tests using a professional Frisbee player dressed in costume.

The best item may be a full commercial featuring the first incarnation of “Tron” sold to radio stations across the country. In it he’s a bearded warrior made of light and he does throw spinning discs!

Digital Imagery – Under this section are another four shorts covering everything you ever wanted to know about the CG effects and the companies that made them: MAGI, Triple-I, and Digital Effects, Inc. It’s amazing to think the first primitive computer generated effects were debuted to the public in 1972! Not to mention that ray tracing came out of military related technology for simulating radiation spread.

Music – The lightcycle chase and end credits are presented with their original scores by Wendy Carlos. The first had the music removed and I believe it was the correct decision due to it simply not fitting what was happening on screen. As for the credits, they had to fit in Journey’s single somewhere.

Making of TRON – A ninety minute documentary about the production, this is the crown jewel of the extras. In it are all sorts of amusing and edifying tidbits, from Bruce Boxleitner not wanting the part of TRON to Peter O’Toole’s fierce desire to play the part. Then there was the Herculean task of making the movie with a first time live action director using unproven technologies.

Most of the effects were not computer generated, but done through backlit cell animation involving over thirty layers for some shots! Most of the time you are seeing hand tinted and composited animation overlaid on black and white film footage. Even so, it was less work than making a completely animated movie.

Like I mentioned before, the making of the film is more fascinating than the movie itself.

Publicity – Trailers, six of them to be precise. Of interest mainly due to how the film was promoted as a dark story with horror undertones. Disney has often made strange choices promoting their live action films. In fact, they could be accused of mispromotion and that still goes on with John Carter being a recent example.

Deleted Scenes – Some interesting content here, but I’ll start with the unnecessary opening prologue explaining the plot of the movie that was added to the English language prints. Either audiences really were dumb or the decision to add this was. I leave it to you to decide.

But the big draw is the deleted love scene, something that Lisberger regretted excising years later. Fully finished with effects and score, it would have added a great deal toward humanizing TRON and YORI. A second unfinished follow up with the two the morning after is also included, albeit with no sound.

Design – These shorts have Syd Mead talking about the lightcycles and animation tests. Also included is the complete arcade game sequence from Space Paranoids in widescreen and its original full screen version.

Storyboarding – Various artists contributed storyboards and Bill Kroyer walks through the lightcycle chase with the original drawings.

Galleries – A treasure trove of concept art and early designs are shown in these slide shows. Not only are Mead’s designs shown, but so are Mobieus’ unique character sketches. The now iconic costumes were his biggest contribution.

BEWARE! HERE BE SPOILERS!!!

 

 

 

 

Speaking of Moebius, his most trippy designs show up in the city where we get to see some truly strange programs walking around. They play no part in the plot, but do add to the spectacle. Vacuum tube guy is my personal favorite, he must be a senior citizen in the Grid.

Flynn checking out the red light programs was to be expected, he does have the maturity of a fourteen year old after all. Amazing to think that the movie would predict cyberporn a decade before the Web was invented.

TRON and YORI make for an adventurous pair running around the back doors of the city. I can see why the actors were cast in a Indian Jones style TV show together a year later called Bring ‘Em Back Alive. They had good chemistry, no doubt about it.

Walter’s alter ego being the guardian of the I/O Tower, Dumont, made a lot of sense given he was the representative of the old guard at ENCOM. The interior of the tower was lovely and fractal like, reminding me of all the Mandelbrots and Julias I used to render back in the ‘90s. I wonder whatever happened to Fractint?

Flynn’s strange energy manipulation powers made it easy for him to blend in with the bad guys, but he comes off like a little boy in how he goes about it. Better red than dead, at least until TRON nearly kills him.

Yeah, I see what you were doing there. Like death and taxes, the Mouse cannot be escaped even if you have a Solar Sailer.

A jarring and odd appearance is that of the Grid Bugs. It’s very random and felt like it was inserted due to their appearance in the tie-in arcade game. Perhaps they were supposed to play a role later in an early draft. Whatever the case may be, it is one strange moment that feels like something out of Wild Kingdom.

I consciously chose to date myself with that last reference since it still would be relevant in 1982. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

One of the cooler effects scenes is when the carrier is derezzing and turns into a wireframe. It turns out this was a very difficult thing to render because of the software used. I would have thought it would have been easy, so that shows how much I know. Another thing that makes it a great scene is Flynn saving YORI from fading out then keeping the wireframe flying.

At long last, TRON and Sark duel outside the MCP’s chamber. It turns into a mind blowing experience for the henchman. I can’t believe they got away with the lingered on gore but hey, it was the Eighties.

See, I promised you a mind blowing scene.

Of course it is standard for the dead villain to get up again. At least it’s more plausible in a computer world with extra lives. The scene reminds me of a Ray Harryhausen fight a little, what with TRON fighting a giant Sark. Turned out well, the effects did.

The final fight with the MCP itself was a little disappointing. Flynn dives inside from above which opens the way for TRON’s Frisbee Identity Disc with the code from Alan. Explosions ensue. For a last boss, the MCP was a pushover.

I did like the Grid powering up after all the hoarded energy was released by the MCP’s destruction. A tantalizing hint at a beautiful and fascinating world is shown. Looking at the captures, it reminds me strongly of contemporary album art.

Though the time lapse of Los Angeles makes for a striking ending, the shot that stood out to me was this one of Dillinger finding out his theft had been exposed. There’s a weary resignation shown that reinforces the impression that he had been promoted beyond his ability to handle. The Peter Principle in a single frame, if you will.