Tron

"The addition of that stately "legacy" to the title strains to confer a retrospective classic status on Disneys virtual reality sci-fi thriller from 1982, about people trapped in a computer game and forced to engage in gladiatorial combat. It might have come as a surprise to some that Tron had much of a legacy; the film was overshadowed by Spielbergs ET in that year, and in the UK suffered the mortification of being upstaged by Peter Greenaways The Draughtsmans Contract. Yet a generation grew up prizing Tron for being audacious, ahead of its time, a futurist trailblazer about games culture and the digital world."

"When hacker Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) first got zapped inside a computer grid in Tron, the digitized ether was a much simpler place. Black, minimalist, streaked with neon piping and floaty geometric figures, it was home to enslaved "programs" who played deadly gladiatorial games (Frisbee, Jai-alai) at the whim of an evil operating system with a giant Lego head. Everyone wore dorky uniforms. There was no downtown, no crowded arenas, no nightlife and certainly no drunken hobos."

"TRON means to be a gloriously puerile movie, the full-fledged screen embodiment of a video game. It even means to go to the heart of video gamesmanship, and its premise is very promising in its way. What if those tiny Space Invaders and Pac-Men were real creatures, miniature gladiators sent to do battle for the amusement of their heartless captors?"

"The interior of a computer is a fine and private place, but none, I fear, do there embrace, except in "Tron," a dazzling movie from Walt Disney in which computers have been used to make themselves romantic and glamorous. Heres a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun."

"Computer-generated monsters, from the trolls in “Harry Potter” and “Lord of the Rings” to the dinosaurs in the “Jurassic Park” movies, have replaced stop-motion puppets and men in rubber suits. But the idea that the lightcycles Tron and Flynn ride existed only on film and in computer memory banks dumbfounded people two decades ago."

"The film would never come close to an Oscar, but that doesn’t make it unimportant. Nobody talks about cyberspace anymore—sci-fi writer William Gibson had just coined the term when Tron came out. But that’s what the movie gave shape to—a “consensual hallucination,” as Gibson wrote, “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.” Though Gibson says he had an entirely different look in mind. “An issue of Omni magazine that contained one of my earliest cyberspace stories also contained a preview of Tron,” he says. “If Disney was into that stuff, I thought, I wasn’t even remotely ahead of the curve.”"

"“Tron” may have exerted its greatest influence through its crew of young artists who have gone on to do important work in animation and special effects: Tim Burton (director of “Planet of the Apes,” “Ed Wood,” “Edward Scissorhands”), Roger Allers (co-director of “The Lion King”), Barry Cook (co-director of “Mulan”), Dennis Edwards (producer of “Osmosis Jones”), Andy Gaskill (art director of “The Lion King”), Bill Kroyer (director of “Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest”), Jerry Rees (director of “The Brave Little Toaster”)."

"“Tron” has influenced CGI animators worldwide. In fact, Disney/Pixar’s John Lasseter has acknowledged that “Without ‘Tron,’ there would be no ‘Toy Story.’” But back in 1982, not only did “Tron” receive mixed reviews from critics and audiences, Hollywood didn’t welcome the film, which paid homage to “The Wizard of Oz” and “Metropolis,” with open arms."

"“I say the lesson that one learns is that you pay the price for going against the status quo,” he admitted. “It’s difficult to emphasize enough how terrified of computers and technology people were, and Hollywood in particular. The threat that ‘Tron’ represented was that somehow computers were going to get involved with movie making and that they were going to get involved with our lives.” And Hollywood was shocked it was Disney that was “suggesting” that computers were going to be part of everyone’s lives. “When I think about Disney, I always think about how they provide nostalgia and a certain amount of comfort that comes from nostalgia. It’s interesting to see how over the decades ‘Tron’ has now gained a patina of nostalgia. In that sense it’s become more of a Disney film now then it was back then. It was very upsetting to people that Disney crossed the line and did something for which there was no precedent.”"

"In an age of amazing special effects, "Tron" is a state-of-the-art movie. It generates not just one imaginary computer universe, but a multitude of them. Using computers as their tools, the Disney filmmakers literally have been able to imagine any fictional landscape, and then have it, through an animated computer program. And they integrate their human actors and the wholly imaginary worlds of Tron so cleverly that I never, ever, got the sensation that I was watching some actor standing in front of, or in the middle of, special effects. The characters inhabit this world."

"There is one additional observation I have to make about "Tron," and I dont really want it to sound like a criticism: This is an almost wholly technological movie. Although its populated by actors who are engaging (Bridges, Cindy Morgan) or sinister (Warner), it is not really a movie about human nature. Like "Star Wars" or "The Empire Strikes Back," but much more so, this movie is a machine to dazzle and delight us. It is not a human-interest adventure in any generally accepted way. Thats all right, of course. Its brilliant at what it does, and in a technical way maybe its breaking ground for a generation of movies in which computer-generated universes will be the background for mind-generated stories about emotion-generated personalities. All things are possible."

"The original TRON, in which Jeff Bridges’ hacker Kevin Flynn is sucked into a computer game of his own devising, was significant more for what it attempted than what it achieved. Created in the pre-dawn of computer graphics, it pointed to a rapidly approaching world where, to use TRON lingo, “the digital frontier would shape the human condition.” As dumb as the tech-heavy script was, and as primitive as the graphics were (today they look like an animated black light painting), the picture was undeniably savvy about the future. It was almost there and ahead of most of the rest of us: TRON came out two years before the Macintosh computer debuted and about a dozen years before the Internet went public."