Tron (1982)

Perhaps oddly, even though it’s become a cult classic, referenced everywhere from South Park to…well, the whole world it’s given in Kingdom Hearts II, until today I had never seen Tron. It came out before I was born, and when I was growing up, it wasn’t really considered much of a classic, and…well, was more of a joke, really, as the computer graphics industry rapidly improved what it could accomplish and left behind the old pioneers. So my experience of the film was really limited to clips and occasional bits and pieces I saw when someone had it on their TV when I went around – and I never did see it broadcast on television.

It’s perhaps difficult to contextualise how advanced those computer graphics were. It’s easy to think of it as era of Space Invaders and PacMan and think that the simple polygons here are phenomenal for their time. Conversely, it’s easy to think of Star Wars and Blade Runner and think that really, this isn’t up to the visual standard set by contemporary sci-fi films. But of course, this is about computer graphics, and what they were capable of in 1982, so the best comparison is really a game like Elite, which is what the machines and the aesthetic of Tron most reminded me of – those early polygonal games with huge ambition, fitting whole galaxies on a single floppy disk. It may be dated and look a little silly now, but remembering how advanced it was for its time and how great the scale once seemed, certainly inclines one to be kinder to it – and Tron is in many ways remarkable on its own terms.

The story seems a bit over-familiar now, but that is mostly because it was rehashed by the likes of ReBoot and others since. A gifted programmer called Flynn is trying to unearth records that prove a corporate chief has cheated him, ending up within the world of the machines. There, programs are little sapient humanoids, who think of ‘users’ as something like deities, and can lose their lives in game worlds. Meanwhile, the system’s Master Control Program is growing be beyond anyone’s control, unless Flynn can stop him, with a little help from watchdog program Tron.

The first thing I thought when I started to watch the film was, ‘Bloody hell – is that Jeff Bridges?’ Which is to say, Oscar Winner Jeff Bridges, the Dude himself. I hadn’t recognised him in the Tron: Legacy trailer, where he is alternately made up to look very old and remarkably young, but there he was, as Flynn, long before I knew who he was, and apparently channelling the spirit of Harrison Ford. Still, he was a strong 80s protagonist, rebellious but likeable, and he even somewhat inexplicably got the girl-program in the end, out of absolutely nowhere. The story is a little ropey, the English guy I recognise from Time Bandits playing all the principle bad guys was really a little too campy as anything but the MCP, and the terrible little puns to replace idioms really could have gone, but otherwise there was much to enjoy. The iconic biking scene remains quite fascinating, amongst some of the weirder shots are some superbly inventive ones, and the design of the world, while dated and campy, has a certain striking, powerful quality, really not an incredible distance from German expressionist films: some close-ups and that old program who sits in a strange dome-garment seem like direct homages.

And there is a strange part of me that thrills to see a little Disney animation pretending to be computer-generated imagery of basic polygonal crab-things. I don’t know why – I just find that fun!