I didn't actuly expect Tron to be a good movie, but I did think that it could be a fun movie in a cheesy 80's sense. Unfortanley, the movie is cheesy, it's not cheesy enough to be funny, and the film takes itself way too seriously to be much fun. Sure, it looks cool, but the complete banalality plot, dialouge and characters make the movie completley uninteresting after the novelty wears off.
The film was the second of the Disney studio's attempt to cash in on the late 70's/early 80's sci-fi craze (The Black Hole was the first). I also have a sneaking suspicion that they were also trying to come up with a new Disney World attraction and decided to test the waters with a movie. In fact, while watchign the film, I thought it might have worked better as an IMAX film or some kind of big formulist art movie instead of its standard action plot.
If you havn't seen the movie, pause for a second and think of what the plot is. You're right! An evil business tycoon (David Warner) has stolen the video games written by Kevin (Jeff Bridges) and made millions off of them. While investigating, Kevin ends up being trapped inside tycoon's big computer where is captured by what are apparently security protocol files and forced to play track and field events, such as frisbee and lacross. He escapes and-you know what happens.
Although character development isn't supposed to be the point in a movie like this, it's so non-existant in Tron that it's almost like a Bresson film, without the ideas of course. There are some heavy handed religious metaphors- (the prorgrammers are suppost to be God) that are also pointless. The whole film is so cold and detached that it's rather dull.
What really works about the film are the formal elements- the movie does indeed look cool. Everything set inside the computer except the actors and the frisbees (I mean "memory disks") is early CGI, with a very intersting color scheme. The sound design and the synthizer score by Wendy Carlos are also very strong. I think that this might have been really cool cineamtic experince if there was no story, maybe just no dialouge- an early 80's meditation on technology and humanity, a la Laurie Anderson. The near tragedity of this film is that Steven Lisbereger created images that had never seen before by human eyes and wasted them on a standard action plot and says absolutley nothing with it. Unfortanley, Lisberger was to talented to have completey failed and have made what we really, really wanted to see- a cheesy 80's movie with lots of bad laughs either.
Tron (1982)