While all this is going on we see the world of a video game from the inside and at the level where those little 8 bit figures look like real people in active wear who talk to each other off script and are aware that they are units in a game, referring to the people who control them as their users. Their world is a combination of a police state and a wonderland under an intense neon glow which renders everything both brighter and darker than it should be. Their faces and hands are in black and white.
During a raid that the trio makes on the ENCOM building, the lead hacker falls victim to the experimental laser that the aforesaid A.I. (called the Master Control Program or MCP which used to stand for Male Chauvinist Pig and would stand for Microsoft Certified Professional) uses to render him into a digital entity and drops him into the game as a unit.
There is a mass more of plot. There has to be: the pile on of concepts forms a complex meta world that is left for later entertainment as the story flashes along at a blur. The notion of artificial intelligence has been a sci fi plot since Frankenstein. Its chief descendant, machine learning was routine in tv shows like The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits and Star Trek. What Tron did was to take the threat of it and merge it with the theme of megalomania as corporate greed and plug that into a neato tale set in one of the new video games.
Those are just the basic building blocks of what's happening here but they'll do for a start. What's more compelling to me is where the merger puts this film in its time. There is a notion that Star Wars brought sci-fi into the A-Movie realm, made it respectable and popular. But the success of Star Wars really only popularised action adventure in space, engendered non-sci-fi clones of itself and drove the darker, more troubling material undergorund. For every Videodrome or Liquid Sky there were a dozen Battle Beyond the Stars. But now and then there were anomalies, mainstream flicks that stuck to their concepts and dressed them up like jumbo popcorn buckets. For all the space opera blaring out of the screens and speakers there was the occasional Blade Runner, Brainstorm and Tron.
Tron doesn't just apply a Wizard of Oz template to its two worlds and make the jargoned speech of the software engineers sound like '40s noir characters, it places itself between the big strong money of the information industry to come and the youngest kid in the house who, plugging away with an Atari in their room, had the house's best if not only computer and was already treating it like culture. When Flynn says, "let's use the wayback machine," he's quoting Mr Peabody and, unknowingly, giving a future Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat the name of their web archiving retrieval system. That prety much sums up a good deal of what Tron has to say: whether you know you're in a game or not, whether you're the boss or a unit, the competition you are part of simply by existing is without date. That's more poignant now than in 1982 as the mix of antique digital graphics and hard sets might have been cutting edge technology then but would be a cultural cutting edge now as retro future. And money grubbing empire building is with us forever and ever. And it plays like a great adventure movie, anyway.
The cast is perfectly adequate but any performances necessarily remain under the veil of the warpo look of the game world and action. That said, the central counterparts of Jeff Bridges as Flynn and the dependable David Warner in his usual ice cold authority figure role ground everything. I noted that South Park had lifted the image of the stylised David Warner as the MCP and used it for the manifestation of Moses in the Jewbilee episode.
All that and you get one of Wendy Carlos' best scores, appropriately old and new in its mix of synthesis and orchestra. On that and the audio mix I'll note here that I watched this through Disney Plus and it had been upgraded to a very busy and boomy 5.1 which made me kill a lot of the bass as it was making my subwoofer rattle louder than the music and effects.
Tron flopped at the cinema. Then again, so did Blade Runner. Both, appropriately, found their fan bases in the emergent home video market that allowed a generation an undeclared film scholarship. But there's something else, going on with Tron's audience that wasn't quite expected. While grown ups found it hard to follow the game levels which can make the plot seem episodic, the kids who knew their Pac Man and Donkey Kong had less trouble. The teens and tertiary students into their online games, MUDs, MUCKs and MOOs, that required the direct injection of player creativity, also got it. The game in Tron doesn't look like Pac Man but what it does look like fired the imaginations of anyone thinking beyond the arcades and consoles and would soon be demanding more from their screen lives.
What Tron didn't anticipate is how movies in the future based on games behaved less like games than movies with three act structures rather than levels. This is not so bad (it's what still happens to novels) but it's interesting when you consider that Predator, made only a few years later, behaved much more like a video game than a sci-fi film which had less influence on game to movie adaptations than perhaps it should. Tron's themes of computer hacking and the figurative digitisation of a game player were solid refinements rather than innovations but the MCP's threat of extending its control and the reasons it gives presages cyber terrorism and probably for the first time. These now routine exploits cause terror at the level of personal identity on a mass scale. What might have been a spoken whim in the writer's room became a future modus operandi. Tron is like that, though, it's creaky and vintage but it can still drive. So, watch it.
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