Tron (I've Finally Seen It!)

A movie only a cult could love, Tron exists to please an audience of which I am not a part. It took a while to catch on, as its original release yielded only lukewarm box office returns and mixed reviews. Nowadays it has a strong fanbase, and as such this Friday a sequel is being released nearly three decades after the original film. The success of Tron: Legacy has yet to be determined, but if one views the original for the first time now, in the age of James Cameron, they are likely to be left cold.

I so wish I could journey back to 1982 to watch this movie with a clean slate, but alas a young’un like myself likely cannot appreciate Tron. At the time, it was no doubt a technical marvel. Today, it’s an artifact. When watching older movies, I am usually able to put the passé special effects aside and focus on the story being told. Not the case with Tron. In this case, the special effects ARE the movie, and as such I felt like I was watching something that no longer held much significance.

The film’s bookends occur in the real world, early on giving us the greatest “Meanwhile” subtitle in the history of the medium. We meet Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a software engineer who created a series of video games which were stolen by a contemporary who passed them off as his own. As a result, Flynn merely runs an arcade with games built from his software. When he tries to expose this Zuckerbergian theft of intellectual property he ends up getting sucked into the system, and the next thing you know he’s playing a game of Light Cycle which would one day influence an iPhone app.

What hurts the film is that, strangely, it isn’t much for exposition. I normally hate excessive explanation of who’s, what’s, how’s and why’s, but Tron refuses to let you get your feet set. Within the first few minutes we enter the computer world, and as such any sense of wonder or scope is immediately lost. There is no build-up to the virtual world’s ultimate reveal, and when Flynn enters and finds himself in the midst of Gladiator: Atari Edition, there’s no real shock and awe because, well, we’ve seen it before. If this is a film about spectacle, then they need to have the audacity to emphasize the alleged grandiosity.

However, the special effects are not the most conspicuously dated weapon in the Tron arsenal. Worse is the musical score, which alternates between lame 80’s synthesizer and even less effective dramatic stings. When it should be generating excitement it seems intent on putting you to sleep.

I would be wrong to call Tron brainless, as the premise is admittedly pretty great. It has the potential to be a transcendent sci-fi film, but instead it merely exists to will the audience into a state of awe. Those in 1982 likely I had never seen anything like it. Just last year I was bored in Avatar’s second half. It is a new era; one that will not be friendly to movies like Tron.

Obviously, the coming sequel has turned everything from the original up to eleven, looking to translate the 80's universe of Tron and make it more aesthetically pleasing to modern audiences. I highly doubt viewing the original is required going in, as it hardly creates much of a complex mythology. We'll see how Tron: Legacy works out, but there exists the possibility that in another 30 years we will see a new Tron sequel. Kids those days will likely find our modern technology downright archaic. This is the inevitable circle of cinema life, and there is little anyone can do to make us whippersnappers wise up and appreciate old-fashioned technology. For those of us in the younger generation, Tron does not compute.

Rating:  (out of 4)