Today I look to the past. The days
before everyone and their brother had a cell phone. I look to a movie that is
as old as the word “internet”. I’ve been blocked lately on what I wanted to
review so I took some suggestions and the one I settled on wasn’t even one that
was directly suggested. I was told by someone very close that I should review
the latest installment of Tron. However, after this person suggested it they
said, “Actually that won’t work because you haven’t seen the original and you
won’t fully appreciate the latest one and how well they did with it.” Well I
took that advice and found the original so I could watch it and then I planned
to do this review on Tron: Legacy, but since I just watched a fairly well known
classic I thought, “Why not review the one you just watched stupid.” So my feel
personally for the movie is that I am really not much of a fan of it. Its main
strike in my book is that it is so much a sci-fi film. That is just one genre
that I could never get into. There was too much technical talk that made no
sense to me and with the age of the film the computer lingo made even less
sense because it’s so out dated. But, alas, I will keep those feelings to
myself as I move on to the rest of the review.
Hacker Flynn, Jeff Bridges, thinks
that he is in a dream when suddenly he finds himself in a digital world
surrounded by people calling themselves programs and speaking almost
religiously about people outside their world known as “users”. All Flynn ever
wanted was his due credit for some video games he made, but now he must fight
for his life and the life of all the programs if he ever wants to get back to
the real world where he belongs. But have no fear because he will have help in
the form of a security program by the name of Tron, Bruce Boxleitner.
This is an interesting and original
concept for a film for the time that it came out and actually it is still a
fairly original movie for today. The idea that a person can get sent into a
computer and meet programs as if they were real people is just not something
you hear a lot about. It was actually
pretty funny to hear the programs talk about what they are meant to do in the
system and see the delight on their face as they tell others what they do for
their users. It’s interesting to see this side of a computer too because it
probably made a few people think twice before deleting an old program after
watching this movie. Really probably one of the best things this movie did for
people is that it made them think after they left the theater. You always have
to remember that in every work of fiction it is still based on some truth. The
question with Tron would be, how much truth is hidden in this old 1980s sci-fi
film? Then I would like to compliment this film on some pretty cool special
effects. Just about the whole film takes place in a digital world and, while
yes you can tell as you’re watching it that this is a very old movie, you see
the creativeness in the machines and creatures of that world. There are no
strings to be seen helping the disc fly through the air and actually there is
like a reverse Wizard of OZ effect in this movie. Just think about it for a
minute. In the real world Flynn and everything else is in perfect color, but
then he goes to the digital world and it’s different. The only color on the
people there is in the lines of the outfit they are wearing. Everybody’s face
is in black and white. There are even very few colors at all in the computer
world. There’s blue, red, yellow/gold, and I was going to list one more but it
would seem that there are no more except for black and white (and if you ask
any student of art those are not colors they are shades). Also it would seem
that in 1982 when Tron was released that people had more of a sense of humor
about religion. They flat out say pretty early in the movie when one of the
programs mentions his user something along the lines of “Oh boy another
religious one”. Come on, even in Tron: Legacy they couldn’t get away with a
joke like that. Then there is basically a short religious ceremony towards the
end that just seemed to slip past the radar of all the people with outrageous opinions
about everything. On a down side though, the movie felt a bit slow at times. It
falls into the action and adventure genres but I just feel that some of the
action was really not all that action packed. It felt at times like The Lord of
the Rings trilogy. By this I mean that there was someone that needed to get
from one place to another that is a fair distance away so the writer, Steven
Lisberger, created hardships for that character to make the journey more
exciting. This works for some movies where the whole movie is not just the
journey, but for The Lord of the Rings and Tron it just seemed like the writer
could have made the journey a bit easier so it wasn’t 90% of the movie and
maybe added some more things before and after the journey so we, the viewers,
could see some good old fashioned character development. In all reality there
isn’t really an obvious lesson that I noticed in this film. I mean
everyone started and ended exactly as they were. There just really doesn’t seem
to be much of a character arch in this movie. So in closing I would say that
you should probably look around and find this movie if you can if only to see
some pretty cool connections between the original and Tron: Legacy.
Ready to join the fight between Tron and the Master Control Program, no? What do you mean you can't digitize yourself into your computer? Well then I guess you'll have to watch the trailer and see how Flynn did it.
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