Two Tron action figures are sitting on top of the Tomy LED Tron game, which is on top of the 35mm film canister containing a print of the film’s trailer. Nearby is a full set of Tron trading cards, and a Japanese 7” single of “Only Solutions”, one of two songs Journey contributed to the soundtrack. On a bookshelf nearby are the novelization and a pop-up book for the movie. Elsewhere are the board game, a press kit and assorted cartridges of related games from the time. I never thought I would ever make a shrine to a picture, but I apparently have done that for 1982’s Tron.
It seems everybody who has only known me as an adult is baffled by my love for this movie. I feel no reason to justify or explain my passion for it, though I have had many people tell me I must have been the right age for it when it was originally released. And, indeed, I was, though I like to think I am able to distinguish between works that only have a nostalgic pull for me, as compared to things I loved as a kid and see differently through older eyes.
At least, I hope I’m able to be objective, though we all have our blind spots. One thing I can’t do is make new viewers forget all the CGI they have been inundated with over the past few decades. We have seen the form rather evolve from simple geometric forms to photo-realistic people. I try to avoid the trap of dismissing work done today as “merely” CGI, as I know a great deal of work goes into it for any studio film. That said, I haven’t really been impressed with any new developments since Gollum in the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. Beyond that, the focus increasingly has been on incredibly life-like renderings. In some cases, I wonder why practical effects weren’t used instead. The worst side effects of CGI have been a decrease in imagination, less focus on story and an overreliance on excessively showy virtual camera moves.
Even if the technology had not been in its nascent years at the time Tron was made, the picture would probably have suffered the same problems. Unfortunately, the film is still weak on story, characters and dialogue, so let’s get that out of the way first.
Bruce Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan and Bernard Hughes all work for ENCOM, a company which is clearly meant to be a stand-in for corporate behemoths of the time like IBM. Jeff Bridges used to work there, but now merely runs an arcade, where he wows customers with his prowess on the machines he wrote the code for, which was then stolen by David Warner. Bridges needs the assistance of friends Boxleitner and Morgan to sneak him into the company so he can hack into now-president Warner’s Master Control Program (MCP) to get evidence of proof of that code theft.
Even as a kid, I think I suspected any evidence he might uncover would pose a weak legal challenge. Then there’s a new toy in the lab where Boxleitner and Morgan set him up at a terminal: a laser which breaks down matter and stores it in the computer, where it can be reassembled later. Kind of like a teleporter, except your point of departure and return are the same, and you just disappear for a while. Even as a first-time viewer when I was kid, I realized how preposterous this was, yet it didn’t stop me from wanting one. Today, I find myself wondering why anything would be in the range of that laser, let alone a chair where the person seated would have their back to it.
Before you can say “deus ex death ray which will zap Jeff Bridges into a terrifying computer world of his own making”, the programmer finds himself in the digital realm which is the movie’s raison d’être. And it is a virtual world (long before the world virtual came to be associated with computers) which is shockingly distinctive in appearance.
To be more accurate, many artists shaped the image of the resulting film, but the end product feels so completely of a whole that one would think it was conceptualized by a single mind. Syd Mead created the harder-edged elements, such as vehicles which are obviously composed of simple geometric shapes. French illustrator Mobius designed the costumes and vehicles and the like which are softer elements.
There were even multiple computer imagery houses employed, as there was too much work for only one firm, and each frame was the result of painfully long render times. MAGI and III (Triple-I) worked on different vehicles, the former making them out of basic geometric shapes, and the latter doing things with complex polygon objects closer to wire mesh objects. An odd comic-relief being named “Bit” was created by Digital Effects. Each company used their own software, so it is astonishing any of the disparate components look as if they belong together on the screen.
One firm only did the journey into the computer world from Bridges’s perspective, and it is stunning. Robert Abel and Associates had to convey what it might feel like to be broken down into individual components and transported to this digital realm. It is a sui generis moment, similar to what I imagine it was like for artist Alex Steinweiss when he created the first album covers. It has to be intimidating to be the first to do anything, whether it visually conveying what music feels like or taking viewers into a world nobody had explored previously. These are also the first moments in the picture where brief visual glitches which were too difficult to redo are covered by the addition of sound effects so as to make these blips seem intentional.
The script is largely mediocre action dialogue, though Bridges gets the single best line when he is first reassembled in this strange world: “It isn’t dreaming, it only thinks it’s dreaming.” He learns in short time this isn’t a dream, and he can feel real pain and probably die as he is forced to play video games in which the stakes are real. As he puts it at one point, “it looked so much easier from the other side of the screen.”
It is comments like that which confuse his fellow pawns, or “programs”, in the games. One of those is the title character, played by Boxleitner. You see, many of the characters in the real world have analogues in the digital world, so to speak. There’s one for Bernard Hughes, the brains behind that laser which brought Bridges here. His digital doppleganger (digiganger?) is akin to a priest, the guardian of the temple where programs can communicate with the real-world users that are regarded as gods.
That is a concept which challenges the authority of Sark, ruler of this domain and David Warner’s surrogate. Really, he is second-in-command to the physical realization of the MCP, which is assimilating programs to gain power. The goal of our heroes, similar to their counterparts in the real world, is to defeat the MCP and Warner.
At the heart of the story is the typical warrior/savior motif, except Boxleitner is the warrior and Bridges is the messiah, a Jesus-like figure from another world who has powers the other programs do not. He can even bring a program played by Dan Shor back from the dead.
We see only three games played in the gladiatorial-like tournaments. One is like jai alai, only with the two competitors standing on platforms of concentric circles. Each ring struck by a shot disappears, making it more likely that contestant will fall into the abyss below. Another has many warriors throwing their “identity discs” (really just Frisbees) at each other.
But the key scene of the film is the light cycle race. These highly stylized cycles leave a wall in their wake that other vehicles (or even their own) might crash into. Fans of early arcade and home video games will recall this same concept used as early as 1976 in the arcade’s Blockade and the Atari 2600’s Surround, and Intellivision’s Snafu in 1981. It is so common in games of the era because it is so simple and so effective.
It also makes for an astonishing action sequence. The aspect of it which was so startling at the time of the picture’s release, and which I still find fascinating today, is these cycles turn at perfect right angles. That may not sound like much, but it is something no viewer could have possibly seen in a feature film before this. Sure, it could have been done in a different type of animation before this, but I don’t recall seeing anything like it before in any form.
CGI limitations of the time made it more difficult to allow the cycles to corner more gracefully, something made possible in first sequel Tron: Legacy and which was a strike against that movie. You see, in 1982, such computer animation was accomplished solely through the input of six numbers (x-, y- and z-position, pitch, yaw, roll) for each moving object for each frame it is on the screen. The rendering software of the time couldn’t extrapolate where an item would be on a frame between its coordinates at two times farther apart. That was entirely up to the animators, who doubtlessly felt their jobs were suddenly something closer to accounting than traditional animation.
Such is the toll of being on the bleeding edge of technology. Another hard lesson learned was the discovery actors could not successfully be integrated into some of the CGI backgrounds, as lens distortion was something not taken into account in rendering the computer imagery.
But the most painstaking task had to be the post-production on the actors’ suits, which have eerily glowing circuitry lines on them. Those were accomplished by filming against a completely black background, printing each frame, blowing it up to 12” x 20”, then making several high-contrast transparencies of both positive and negative images. There were at least five layers for each actor for each frame: the original image, the body by itself, the circuitry on the suit and, lastly, ones for the actor’s face, eyes and teeth. Imagine hand-cutting those circuit lines on the body so light could shine through those gaps from behind. Then the finished composite of those layers for just the actors was photographed and then that was layered over a CGI background and photographed yet again. Even the seemingly simply act of filming actors in white suits against black backgrounds proved to be painful lesson, as it was discovered the high-contrast film specially manufactured for the shoot by Kodak had to be used in the order the rolls were processed. When the boxes of film were used indiscriminately, light intensity varied greatly from one roll to the next. Still, there was a tool already in their toolbox to address such abrupt changes in image and that was more computer sound effects.
Some of those shots of actors had upwards of 30 layers, with most complex being for Cindy Morgan’s Yori, in a scene which was cut. Despite the amount of work that had to have gone into that, this was a wise decision, as this cringe-worthy moment can only be described as the “love scene from Tron”. You don’t have to have seen a second of this picture to know what a bad idea that is.
I suspect what the filmmakers had hoped to accomplish with that scene was to humanize the story better. It is strange to see this today and consider how foreign the terminology in this was at the time for most viewers, and what an alienating experience it was for them. Relatively few people at the time used a computer in their work and even fewer had a personal computer at home. So, even using the most basic terms as “users” and “programs” pushed many out of the experience. That a character named Bit can only communicate by saying “yes” or “no” went well over many heads. When I saw the original Dune in the theater, we were handed double-sided terminology sheets (guess how well that worked, and in a dark auditorium, to boot), but Tron probably needed one even more than Lynch’s film.
One important element I need to single out is the brilliant synth score by Wendy Carlos. The former Walter Carlos had created creepy Moog renditions of classical works for A Clockwork Orange. Here, the analog synth tones fluctuate between warm and harsh, depending upon the scene. The main theme is a deeply beautiful tune and the final minutes of the end credits roll under a pipe organ rendition of it. That is a good palate cleanser after a truly awful Journey song which precedes it. That band contributed two songs and, as much as I am indifferent towards them, I am loathe to concede the strong association between their music and arcades back in that particular day.
The older I get, and the more distance is put between now and the time I first saw it at the ideal age, the more I notice the flaws in this movie, no matter how hard I try to overlook them. The plot is somehow simultaneously very simplistic and a tad difficult to follow. There is at least one thread that doesn’t go anywhere, where Lori warns about “grid bugs” that suddenly appear en masse under the Solar Sailor our heroes are in, flying high over the creatures. The bugs seem to be confined to the ground and so don’t appear to be much of a threat. Then they are never seen or mentioned again.
The element of the plot which leaves me more confused with each additional viewing is the nature of the video game warriors, especially as concerns free will. Consider the light cycle arena sequence: if this is what is really happening when somebody in the real world is at an arcade cabinet, then the player has to be controlling the computer world versions of Bridges and Boxleitner (also, Dan Shor, whom I had yet to mention). But our heroes are able to control their cycles themselves, and that would have to be in defiance of the player’s actions. So, who is really in control?
Then there’s the programs themselves. Shor’s character is an actuarial program, and he seems to know little about anything but insurance. So, what would be the purpose of having such a program compete in the gaming arenas? For that matter, games don’t use other programs for anything, really. Try to imagine what real-world scenario would necessitate Grand Theft Auto needing Excel. Even if the former stripped the latter of its functions, would it apply newly acquired pivot table expertise to better slap around prostitutes?
And where do the programs come from? Obviously, they are written by users, but there appears to be some sort of organic baby makin’ process happening in this realm, as that deleted scene had Boxleitner and Morgan about to get it on. Are baby programs called subroutines? Just imagine how terminology like that would have gone over with audiences in 1982.
Even with the growing list of questions about this movie I have been forming over time, I still cannot help but feel a sense of wonder each time I watch Tron. Sure, it is largely nostalgia. Still, I love to lose myself in this strange world that honestly looks and feels like nothing else I have seen, and that includes the one sequel released to date. The strange flickers in the imagery of the world inside the computer have a mesmerizing effect akin to watching a silent film like Metropolis or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in the wee hours of the morning. The very clean and clearcut design of vehicles and backgrounds are a look that would be almost immediately superseded by attempts to make entirely digital creations appear more organic—a goal which still feels counterintuitive to me. As we find ourselves in a age where there is a deficit of wonder and imagination, it recalls a time where the future appeared hopeful and full of boundless potential. Even working on it must have felt like that, as an animator says in one retrospective interview: “You could go to work each day and do something nobody has done before.”
Dir: Steven Lisberger
Starring Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan
Watched in a theater several times when I was a kid, then VHS, laserdisc box set, DVD and blu-ray. Also, in my mind’s eye whenever I need to feel better.