TRON (1982)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
"Tron" is a migraine-inducing and jaw-droppingly boring mess of a movie. It has visuals that can elicit about as much interest as looking at an Atari video game with binoculars.
Jeff Bridges is Kevin Flynn, a former employee of a high-tech software computer company, ENCOM, who works at an arcade. Flynn believes that a certain Ed Dillinger (David Warner), an employee at ENCOM, plagiarized some of Flynn's video games. Flynn tries to hack into a mainframe computer with the help of someone from the inside, namely Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) who runs computer security at ENCOM and is concerned about hackers. Cindy Morgan plays another employee of ENCOM who aids the two male protagonists as they are all "users," meaning they play the game or run the program in their likeness. Kevin breaks into the company to defeat the MCP (Master Control Program) and is accidentally zapped into that world, the Digital World, by the MCP due to a teleportation device, but not as a "user." If you can follow this, terrific. If not, consider that my high school grades in Computer Science were not that great.
"Tron" was considered a milestone in the world of cinematic, computerized special-effects (as the head of Pixar, John Lasseter, said that without "Tron" there would've been no "Toy Story"). I am not in awe of these effects (and never was when I saw some excerpts back in 1982) nor do they seem all that special. They are monochromatic graphics combined with live footage of the actors shot in black-and-white and wearing white gear with an occasional burst of neon color. The movie itself is a bore, an insipid bore, with a closing shot of a helicopter arriving at the top of a building that is more impressive than the giant Atari screen effects we have to sit through.
The opening ten minutes of the film are actually entertaining. We are introduced to something cryptic with the cold-hearted antagonist, Dillinger, talking to the MCP. There is Jeff Bridges projecting a certain lively, upbeat kind of character and, for a moment, I was enveloped by "Tron." The rest of the movie is rotoscoping and a lot of computer graphics that wouldn't charm a human pinball.
