TRON

This was a movie released in 1982 by Disney, which we saw in the movie theaters when it came out, on our home leave to the US that summer.  It features, among others, Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan, and Bernard Hughes.  The true star, of course, is the special effects.

Story.  The main character, Flynn (Bridges) starts off the movie as a video arcade operator, squeezed out of ENCOM (hmm, sounds like ENRON) by Dillinger (Warner) who stole his game, “Space Paranoids”, and has basically taken over not only the firm itself, but also its system, with his ominous Master Control Program (MCP), which had started out as a chess program (ZZZ).  Flynn meets up with Alan (Boxleitner) and Lora (Morgan) who still work at ENCOM and find Dillinger’s management practices and policies less than ideal.  They sneak Flynn into ENCOM after hours.

Flynn tries to break into the system, and is digitized into the computer itself.  This is where the fun and magic – and confusion – begin.

In the virtual computer world, the programs are personified into people.  They either submit to the MCP or face off against each other in gladiatorial games, including a light cycle game and another one involving discs thrown around like jai alai (where are Crockett and Tubbs?  With G. Gordon Liddy as Dillinger!).  Flynn and his comrade Tron (the computer version of Alan), meet up with another program, Ram, and escape from the games.  Eventually they team up with Yori (Lora’s virtual counterpart) and set off to bring down Sark (Dillinger’s computer counterpart) and the MCP.

To be honest, I found the subtleties of the plot a bit hard to follow, both as a 13 year old in 1982 and as a 39 year old a few weeks ago watching the film again.  Suffice to say that the following things happen:

1.         Ram is de-rezzed (killed), but not before learning that Flynn is, in fact a user (real person and not just another program). 

2.         Flynn captures a Recognizer (nasty bad guy tank which looks like an unfolded staple flying around with its open end face down) and makes some progress in that.

3.         They steal a Solar Sailor, an incredibly cool ship which sails along a beam over cyber landscapes.

4.         Tron interfaces with an I/O tower with his disc and gets the necessary information from Alan in the real world, on how to defeat the MCP.

5.         Despite being captured, Flynn and Lori manage to escape and assist Tron in defeating first Sark, then the MCP itself, which explodes in spectacular fashion. 

6.         With the MCP destroyed, Flynn is re-digitized back to real life, Dillinger is discredited, and Flynn gets to take control over ENCOM.  And there was much rejoicing…

Special effects.  Even today, they hold up remarkably well.  In fact, the entire environment was unique; I haven’t seen anything like it since.  The clever part about this is that it’s MEANT to be a virtual world, not the real world corrupted and enhanced with special effects.  This is why “Tron” and “The Matrix” worked so well, and why “The Phantom Menace” worked so poorly.

            I’m not one of those people who tries so hard to discredit and slam films with substantial special effects, as if to say “uh, you don’t impress me.”  I try to enjoy them and appreciate their role in the picture.  Unless the plot totally and completely sucks, and the movie makers clearly intended to bootstrap the film relying on the special effects – which seemed to be the case with “The Phantom Menace” and the subsequent Matrix films – I can handle them.  I will agree that in some cases, like the recent “Spiderman” films with Toby Maguire (spectacularly miscast as Peter Parker, in my opinion), the special effects are overwhelming even with a passable plot.   It’s all a matter of balance and execution, but ultimately the appreciation and entertainment element will be subjective.  We all have different tastes.

Video games.  I never liked the standalone arcade version of this game.  The video games we really got into with this were the three Intellivision games, “Tron Deadly Discs”, “Tron Maze-A-Tron”, and “Tron Solar Sailor”, the last being one with the IntelliVoice system. 

            Although well done and impressive, “Solar Sailor” was a bit ambitious, and I don’t recall playing it more than 2-3 times, much less completing the game.  “Maze-A-Tron” was alluring and tempting, but I found the scrolling feature to be annoying as hell, as was the MCP challenge phase.  Even if you defeated the MCP, you still got sent back to the maze phase.  So what was the point?? Remarkably, it was “Deadly Discs”, the crudest and simplest of the three, which I found most playable and enjoyable, and which we played by far the most.  You simply throw the disc at the three opponents, block their special discs, knock the doors open, defeat the Recognizer, and after a million points, avoid the bad guys with their paralysis sticks.  This was a game you could play for awhile without getting bored, and one of the better Intellivision games.

Jeff Bridges.  I’ve already mentioned the 1976 King Kong film.  I have to say I generally like his roles, particularly “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” (w/Clint Eastwood), “The Big Lebowski” (w/John Goodman), and “Tucker”.

David Warner.  Remarkably, this guy is STILL alive and still doing movies, though nothing I’ve seen him in lately.  Like Patrick Stewart, he’s a Shakespearean actor who found himself immersed in science-fiction roles. In addition to this film, his other great bad guy role was as Jack the Ripper in “Time After Time”, the 1979 sci-fi film which featured “your humble narrator” Malcolm McDowell as effete, shy, bookish H.G. Wells instead of the nasty, ultra-violent Alex from “A Clockwork Orange”.

Cindy Morgan.  My brother pointed out that she was also the slut in “Caddyshack”, perhaps not as recognizable here with no golf courses, Chevy Chase, or Bill Murray in the Tron virtual world.

I hear they will be making a sequel to Tron, possibly involving Jeff Bridges.  I’ll certainly watch it.