The fifth in my series of video game film essays for 1up.com. Tron was enough of a cult classic to get an undeserved sequel many year later. I don’t much care for it, but find it to be more than marginally fascinating from a historical point of view, which is more than can be said for more films that hinge on video games. At this point, I became far more interested in movies like this that tried to represent games than I did adaptations themselves, though sadly this was the only time I was paid to write about one of them.
While we already covered the Super Mario Bros. film that has the distinction of being the first actual adaptation of a video game into a live-action movie, movies based upon games and gaming culture had been around for more than a decade before them. Sure, a lot of them seem largely confused about what exactly playing a video game entails, most of them posit some sort of virtual reality gaming that looks more ridiculous every year, and one of them is The Wizard, but up until the 90s trend of adapting actual games, these game-themed pictures were a big thing. What’s more, their track record for success is a lot higher than full-fledged adaptations, although admittedly that’s praise so faint as to be almost completely meaningless. The origin of these pictures was Tron, that behemoth by Disney which has the distinction of being one the most unique pictures in cinema history despite being endlessly ripped off by other movies so many times it would make Quentin Tarantino blush.
The alpha and the omega of the original Tron is Steven Lisberger, who directed and wrote the movie, not to mention producing it with the unsurprisingly titled Lisberger Studios (though it should be noted that due to reasons of baffling Hollywood logic, he was not credited as a “producer”). He’s the reason why the movie is utterly fascinating in some areas and a horrid mess in others, frequently at the same time.
Lisberger was working as an animator in Boston when he saw a demo reel by the CGI firm MAGI and soon afterwards checked out Pong. The two ideas clicked, and the plot of going inside a computer to play games and compete with the computer for your life was soon invented. For more examples of this concept feel free to watch the TV series Reboot, The Matrix Trilogy, Arcade, etc. While the idea of people going inside computer worlds seems natural today—and when you really think about it, it shouldn’t—the crazy thing about this is that it took place in 1976, when Pong really was one of the better games available. Lisberger had his company pump out two animated TV specials called the Animalympics (which actually featured the first professional work by a young Brad Bird) in order to help fund Tron’s storyboard, which would be necessary for shopping it around to studios. After being rejected by everyone else in Hollywood due to little things like no real directing experience and using radically untested new technology, Lisberger and friends ended up at Disney, who greenlit the project and started prepping for the film.
The most revolutionary aspect of Tron is that it was the first feature-length film to feature more than just a couple seconds of computer generated imagery. CGI plays an important part in most of the film’s memorable sequences, which makes it easy to forget how little CGI is actually in the movie: about 15 minutes worth. By 1982 standards that’s a lot, but today that’s pretty much nothing. For instance, I’m still disappointed that Roland Emmerich’s nominally live-action film 2012 was snubbed when it came to animation Oscars, since at 158 minutes of length by my reckoning it has more frames of computer animation than the category’s winning entry, Up.
Tron was meant more as a showcase for backlit animation, a neat technique that makes everything look like it’s a neon beer sign, than for CGI. The primary, perhaps only, use of this in the movie was to make the actors’ suits and certain backgrounds look like they have glowing diodes. It’s a neat effect, but Tron Guy’s suit isn’t too far off from it and didn’t take a team of Taiwanese animators years of their lives to make. Other than a brief appearance in The Secret of Nimh, backlit animation has never been used again.
CGI became part of the project because Lisberger thought that there was no other way of representing the abstract world within a computer than with the inhuman precision you get from CGI, a fair point, and characters made of backlit animation seemed perfect for computers. So the film would combine both of these techniques and be a revolutionary, hybrid film like nothing ever seen before. All of the ideas gelled nicely into place, with the one huge, monumentally destructive elephant in the room being that Lisberger is a terrible writer and piss-poor at directing actors. That isn’t to say that his idea for the film’s story is innately bad, since it’s not. It’s just that for whatever reason Lisberger thought that he could write little things like dialogue and believable characters despite never having done so before, and for whatever reason the Walt Disney Company believed him. In retrospect, Lisberger’s career seems as much a result of his visionary technological ideas as it is his ability to convince people he knows what he’s doing when that’s clearly not the case.
Tron begins with a title sequence that can best be described as amazing. In one shot we’re shown everything that’s good about the movie and why it remains a landmark in geek culture despite a lot of pretty obvious shortcomings. We begin in a computer-generated star-field of sorts reminiscent of 2001 (the first, but nowhere near the last, Kubrick homage in the film) while bits of Tron are compositing, which quickly come together in a blast of flurescent blue that becomes the Tron logo. We move past this in a matter of seconds, but it’s beautiful and continues as the logo turns on its side and we go through it, travelling past thousands of high-tech looking squiggles that mean nothing but do a pretty good job conveying the idea that something computer-y is happening and the future is now.
…and then the movie unfortunately dissolves into live-action.
Tron is split between the quite interesting science-fiction world inside of computers and the largely stupid, somewhat vague politicking we see in reality. In the future, a software corporation named ENCOM earns a fortune off of a series of video games stolen by Ed Dillinger from one of its other employees, Kevin Flynn. It then uses the money earned from this to become a huge multinational conglomerate, presumably, and with this … uh… makes more games, possibly, and also enormous lasers that destroy objects in order to scan them into a computer? Or something? Anyhow, their business model is a bit unclear.
Dillinger kicked Flynn out of the company and took over, along with this creating an artificial intelligence program he cleverly titled Master Control Program, which specializes in pirating other programs—it’s like an A.I. version of bittorrent, only evil. But this MCP is being opposed by employee Alan Bradley, largely because it interferes with his day-to-day work, which is seemingly to muss up Dillinger’s schemes, and his trusty girlfriend/side-kick Dr. Lora Baines, who also just happens to be Flynn’s ex-girlfriend. While the evil A.I. program is clichéd but necessary, the rest manages to be tedious, needlessly complex, and pretty damn unrealistic even for a movie where people live in a computer. One of the odder parts of Tron is that since its virtual world is so deliberate and its real world scenes so hacked together at the last minute, the world with the guys in foam suits that light up and fight with Frisbees feels significantly more believable.
Our trio of heroes decides that if they can break into ENCOM and install Bradley’s Tron program they should be able to destroy the MCP. But the MCP notices Flynn trying to hack the company’s computer, so it does what any sentient computer would do under these circumstances and zaps Flynn with the conveniently nearby laser, then uploads him as a warrior to be destroyed through a series of gladiatorial games to the death. In case you can’t tell, it’s at this point that the movie starts being good again after taking a long break in the realm of insane backstory and unnecessary love triangles.
While Lisenberg is the driving force of Tron, the person most people remember from the movie is definitely Jeff “The Dude” Bridges. Even in 1982 he was a well-known actor with two Academy Award nominations, and so Lisenberg’s direction for Bridges seems to have been just letting him do what he wants. Flynn is pretty much Bridges as a computer programmer, and it’s not difficult to imagine that he spends his free time with the same recreational drugs as the man who plays him. Fans have long speculated that The Dude is basically Flynn burnt out and living in Los Angeles. Even the gamer aspect of his character isn’t an exaggeration—for some reason Lisenberg thought it was a good idea to fill his studio with arcade games, which Bridges spent much of the shoot playing. However awkward the dialogue he’s given and ridiculous the situation he’s put in may be, Bridges is still able to make things feel casual and natural. It makes sense that he’s memorable, given that he’s the only real human who we spend time with during the entire movie, but it’s little exaggeration to say that he’s what really ties the film together.
With the rest of the cast it’s hard to figure out exactly how to place their acting, as it raises the question of what these sci-fi beings are supposed to be like anyhow. Bruce Boxleitner, who plays Tron himself, is pretty stiff and mechanical, but then so is his character, so that’s fine. Less forgivable is that this is the case both in the real world and within the computer. The same is true for Cindy Morgan, who plays almost literally the only female in the entire movie who’s not an extra (although at one point we get a glimpse at what can only be described as prostitute programs, who were clearly necessary for the story), and Dan Shor, who plays Ram, the character who exists solely to die and give Tron and Flynn some pathos. David Warner, who plays the evil Ed Dillinger, the evil MCP program, and the evil Sark, is also pretty one note despite his range of roles, but what do you really expect? While a lot of the time Bridges feels like he’s from another world because of how he’s written, frequently it’s actually because as far as acting goes, he really is from an entirely different plane from the rest of the group.
But no one watches a movie like Tron for acting, they watch it for the cool graphics and the fantastic world, which I think are best analyzed by taking another look at the costumes being worn inside the computer. On the one hand, they’re a pretty amazing grafting of animation and real-life. Every single frame with actors inside the computer had to go through multiple passes and then be hand animated in order to make the lights on those suits pop, a process which has never been repeated and almost certainly never will. They’re unique, they have a bold sense of design, and from afar they’re almost magical. Closer up, though, they look completely ridiculous as it’s obvious that it’s just a bunch of humans wearing really awful foam suits, fumbling around due to a lack of any setting or props (in order for the animation to work, blank backgrounds were needed, effectively creating green screen moviemaking years before such a thing existed). If you’re watching in the same room as someone who hasn’t seen Tron before and it cuts to a close-up, there’s no way of not being embarrassed about how stupid it looks. Really, though, it looks just so, so dumb.
Most of Tron holds up just as well as the suits, which is to say it’s really cool when you’re not paying too much attention but absolutely dreadful closer up. Now in the computer, Bridges meets up with the friendly Tron and RAM program-people before being led to the games. The games themselves are one of the best-remembered parts of the movie and they’re also a lot better thought out than really anything that comes after them. It’s almost immediately clear that Lisenberg’s idea was pretty much to have a human go into a computer and play computer games face-to-face; the rest of this nonsense was just filler.
Bridges and his friends compete in three games I’ll list in increasing order of awesomeness: first a modified jai alai to the death, then modified ultimate frisbee (well, more like Guts) to the death, then modified motorcycle racing … to the death. Each one is original and well-directed, storyboarded for maximum impact. Lisenberg is a technical director, i.e. doesn’t know what acting is, and so these scenes, which are mostly about special effects virtuosity, play to his strengths. The light cycles in particular remain well-remembered, and while they’re rendered in untextured shapes, quick cutting and the sheer excitement of the sequence make it so that this doesn’t matter. While other uses of CGI in the movie can at times be glaringly out-of-date, the light cycle sequence is still pretty timeless
After the exciting light cycle chase, there’s still roughly half the movie to go and almost all the exciting parts have been used up. Tron needs to get new programming and the group heads out to help him, but along the way RAM, the character who exists solely to die and give Tron and Flynn some pathos, unexpectedly dies. Tron gets help from a program by Baines and eventually reaches his new programming, while Flynn is separated and learns that he has godlike abilities to control the matrix because he’s a human. Oh that’s right, the whole religious aspect of the Matrix actually originated with Tron, and the reason for much of the conflict in ENCOM’s computer system is actually a religious debate as to whether or not programs were created by godlike users or if creationists are stupid and should be subjected to a series of absurd games to the death. I just haven’t mentioned this whole subplot until now because it’s kind of dumb and, frankly, makes me feel like rooting for the bad guys.
Nothing particularly interesting happens for the next 20+ minutes until Tron is nearing its end. Tron faces off against Sark in another frisbee battle … only this time it’s personal. Simultaneously, Bridges and Tron’s girlfriend crash a space(?)ship into the MCP, who’s now showing his true self—which turns out to look an awful lot like a red Zordon from the Power Rangers wearing eighteen tons of hooker lipstick. This diverts power away from Sark, while Tron moves in to deal the killing blow after his adversary grows to enormous size for part 2 of the boss fight.
The last interesting thing that happens is that Bridges makes out with a computer program who looks exactly like his ex-girlfriend wearing a really stupid costume. It’s not relevant to the plot or anything, I just wanted to point out how messed up that is. Especially since he knows that she’s with another program—c’mon, dude, that ain’t cool.
After all that we’re left with a happy ending where Flynn gains his body back, then gets his game rights back, then we skip forward in time and he’s become CEO of ENCOM, because that’s totally how corporations actually work. The conclusion, like most of the rest of the latter half of the film, isn’t thought out too well, but it’s functional enough.
Tron was a success but not a blockbuster, and while Disney didn’t lose any money on the film it was still disappointed with the picture’s returns. Reviews were also mixed, largely dependent upon what particular reviewers were looking for in a film. If it was sheer visual invention and spectacle, they were generally content, but if it was pretty much anything else they tended to hate it. While not my favorite review of the movie, Dave Kehr’s blurb for the Chicago Reader sums it up pretty well, “Lisberger’s failures of pacing, structure, variation, and characterization ultimately make the film seem monotonous and distant.” But to me 20 minutes of truly spectacular filmmaking surrounded by an hour of disappointment is preferable to a picture that plods along decently the whole way through. While most of Tron is middling at best, it’s worth watching the whole movie for the parts that aren’t.
Tron also showed real foresight in both its methodology and its story. John Lasseter has professed that seeing it was one of his inspirations in moving to computer animation, which is important since we all know that Pixar is kind of the best production company ever in existence (no seriously). As far as the industry as a whole goes, what was more important is the way it used CGI to replace traditional mattes for scenery and backgrounds. Full-fledged CGI short films were being done at the time, but combining these images with live-action was a bold and weirdly controversial step. That always forward-thinking institution the Motion Picture Academy wouldn’t allow Tron’s nomination for a special effects award because many of its effects were made by computers, which today feels akin to not allowing an album to be nominated for a Grammy because it used multitrack recording.
The film’s story was just as influential. Movies, games, and even books (and even books that aren’t the novelization of Tron) still regularly focus on what it would be like to live in a computer. There were probably earlier works that did so before it, but they were relatively obscure whereas Tron has cast a long shadow. There also aren’t many films that have a sequel released nearly 30 years after the original. The picture has been a cult hit since its release, and regardless of its many flaws remains a testament to geeky filmmaking ingenuity.