My Thoughts on “Tron” (1982)

 

(This is the poster for Tron (1982).) 

As promised I’m reviewing the 1982 Tron movie before jumping into Tron: Legacy. It just didn’t feel right reviewing Tron: Legacy without watching Tron (1982) since that movie wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for this movie setting the template first, and I hadn’t seen it and had easy access to it since it’s on Disney+. So, there was no excuse for me not to watch. I also wanted to watch this movie and engage with it on its own terms, give it its time in the spotlight, and judge it on its own merits since it seems nowadays, people only engage with this movie just so that they can watch Tron: Legacy. You wouldn’t believe how many movie reactors on YouTube I’ve seen where the only reason they do reactions to Tron (1982) is just so that they can do reactions Tron: Legacy, the more popular and well known of the two Tron movies we have so far (we’re getting another one this fall 🍂, with Tron: Ares). 

 

More often than not, it’s their viewers, their subscribers, their Patreon supporters that tell them to react to this movie first before diving into Tron: Legacy. It’s sort of like what’s happening to Top Gun, people are only watching the first Top Gun just so that they can watch Top Gun: Maverick, another Joseph Kosinski movie. Is this just Joseph Kosinski’s thing? He makes legacy sequels that just completely outshine the original to the point where modern audiences only engage with the original just so they can watch the legacy sequel, rather than engaging with the original just because the original’s a good movie and is apart of film history worth preserving. 

You might say that I’m doing the same time since I’m planning on reviewing Tron: Legacy almost immediately after, and yeah, some of level it is, I like to think that I’m doing it a much more respectful way. That I’m giving this movie it’s time in the Sun ☀️, judging it on its merits, and just treating it as its own individual product, rather than a stepping stone to get to something else. I wasn’t fully sure if I was even going to like this movie, if I was going to get bored by it, or if it was going to feel dated because of the effects, but surprisingly, I actually really enjoyed it. I do think that this is a good movie, and it is worth your time beyond just being the thing you need to watch to understand what happens in Tron: Legacy. 

 

It’s a neat little sci-fi movie released in a year of other neat little sci-fi movies, those of course being Blade Runner (1982) and John Carpenter’s The Thing. All three of which, bombed 💣 at the box office, but developed cult followings afterwards. Couldn’t compete with E.T., that movie’s gravitational pull was simply too strong for any movie to overcome, especially sci-fi. No matter compelling it is, no matter how it reinvents and redefines the genre, people would rather see the fun, wholesome, and feel good movie about a boy who befriends an alien 👽 who got stranded on Earth 🌎 and trying to get back home. 

And make no mistake, this movie was pretty groundbreaking for its time. This was one of the earliest and most extensive uses of CGI in a motion picture. No one had really seen anything like it on screen, and it pretty much laid the groundwork for other CGI movies later on. This movie walked so that movies like Young Sherlock Holmes, Akira (1988), The Abyss, Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, and even Toy Story to name but a few could run. So, its importance to cinema cannot and should not be questioned. Even if the effects do admittedly look pretty dated by today’s standards. Even the matte paintings have become dated a little bit. Like the matte painting that was used in the scene at the Encom building where we see all of the office cubicles and they used a matte painting to extend it and make the office space look bigger (like it has way more cubicles), even that doesn’t look very real anymore. 

 

That being said, I still like matte paintings, and I wish more modern movies would use matte paintings. Especially with the technology we have now, you could digitally composite matte paintings into a shot, touch them up with CGI, and make them look even more real than if you had just used the matte paintings alone and didn’t digitally composite them into a shot. The only one still using them is Wes Anderson, and he sucks. He doesn’t even try to make them look real, in fact, all of his movies (at least all of his most recent movies) have this fake quality to them where they don’t look real at all, and seem inauthentic. That’s the best word to describe Wes Anderson, inauthentic.

 

But, this movie’s dated effects to give it a unique aesthetic that is different from other films out there. No other movie before or after it really looked anything like it, except for maybe that Korean Tron knock-off 🇰🇷 that Brandon Tenold reviewed almost 10 years ago at this point (can you believe that 😱?). But even then, it didn’t get 100% close, and wasn’t purely a Tron ripoff. Not even the sequels really tried to replicate this aesthetic. Tron: Legacy created its own aesthetic that, while respectful of the first movie, was distinct from the first movie. Every other Tron media after Legacy followed its aesthetic rather than the first movie. Probably because Legacy’s aesthetic is more conducive to a modern day blockbuster or modern day animated series (in the case of Tron: Uprising) than this movie’s aesthetic is. Even Tron: Ares, though being a soft reboot of sorts that tells its own story and follows a new main character rather than continue the story and follow the characters from Legacy, still follows Legacy’s aesthetic rather than Tron (1982)’s. It’s trying to look a lot more like Legacy and its depiction of the digital world of the Grid than it is this movie and its version of the Grid. 

Like, for example, in this movie, all of the programs and users (there’s only one user in this movie) all wear helmets and their suits are all white, even the bad guys. The only parts of them that are different colors are the lights on their suits, which correspond with whether they’re good or evil. Good programs have blue lights whereas bad programs have red lights. It’s kind of like the Star Wars movie where blue is a color associated with good and red is a color associated with evil. It’s a very easy way to tell both sides apart. Whereas in Legacy, and every other piece of Tron media afterwards, the programs and users inside the Grid don’t wear helmets (only when they ride light cycles or if it covers their whole face and conceals their identity) and their suits are black instead of white. There’s also a greater variety of colors in the lights on each program or user who enters the Grid. Some have blue lights, some have red lights, some have green lights, some have yellow lights, some have orange lights, some have turquoise lights, some have aqua lights, and some have white lights. 

 

The bikes also look way different in Legacy than they do in this movie. In this movie, the light cycles have a window or dome that completely encases the rider and keeps them protected, which is especially important when they’re doing those light trails. This makes them look more like two wheeled cars rather than motorcycles 🏍️. But, in Legacy, the light cycles look a bit more like typical motorcycles with the rider being completely exposed and their only protection being the helmets they wear while riding. The Recognizers and Solar Sailer look mostly the same, except that they’re more detailed owing to the more advanced special effects and different aesthetic that Legacy was aiming for. They also don’t call it the Grid at any point in this movie, which makes me think that they came up with that name for Legacy, or the Grid that we see in Legacy is technically not the same place that we see in this movie as it’s been changed and modified in the years since.

One thing that was surprising to me upon watching this movie was just how different in tone it is to Legacy. Even though they essentially have the same plot of a guy ♂︎ getting sucked into a computer world, having to play some death games against his will by the bad guys, and then teaming up with some friendly programs to take down the bad guys, usually a rogue AI or program, they couldn’t be any different totally. This movie has a sort of whimsical and almost lighthearted tone, like it feels very much like an 80s movie, it’s unabashedly 80s, even with the groundbreaking CGI effects and unique aesthetic of the Grid and even the offices of the computer company, ENCOM, which sounds a bit like Enron if you ask me. My phone 📱 even autocorrected me when I spelt ENCOM to say Enron instead, even if Encom isn’t as corrupt or unstable as Enron was. It’s really just Dillinger who’s the only bad guy here, he’s the only bad apple who’s driving the company into the ground. Whereas Legacy is darker and grittier, and feels a lot more like a typical blockbuster from the late 2000s and early 2010s, which is when it came out. It came out in 2010 whereas this movie came out in 1982, the early 80s. 

Honestly though, these two movies offer two different favors nostalgia, since so much time has passed since both of them came out. You could watch this movie and get a good sense of 80s nostalgia, just from that arcade scene alone, which proves that even back then, it was possible to get popular for playing video games. And you could watch Legacy and get a good sense of 2010s nostalgia, since we’re far enough removed from the 2010s that we can now see it as its own distinct decade with its own aesthetic, culture, and vibe, just we like have with 2000s, and people are now old enough to where they’re starting to feel nostalgic for the 2010s just like they are for the 2000s. You wouldn’t believe how many online now say 2016 was the best year, or was their best year, and that it was the last good year, and that they wish they could go back to it. Despite people who actually lived in 2016 in the moment saying that it was the worst year. Every year is the worst year until enough time passes and that year you said was the worst year all of a sudden starts looking like the best year especially compared to the year you’re currently living in. And that’s simply because we only remember the good things from a year and forget about or ignore all the bad things. Nostalgia is one helluva drug. 

For the longest time, I was under the impression that this was a video game movie, like even though it wasn’t directly based off of a video game, it was at least about video games and the world that Kevin Flynn gets sucked into was a video game world. And while it sort of is, it’s also sort of not. It’s more of a general computer world inhabited by various different computer programs, like there’s an insurance program and an accounting program at one point. Even the main evil AI in the movie, the Master Control Program (MCP) started out as a chess program ♟️ and then grew and became something else, became a general use AI that ENCOM relied on carry out various tasks, until it became way too powerful for its own good, and started becoming a threat to the company and to the world. Like, Master Control wants to get into the Pentagon’s computer system, as well as the Kremlin’s, for who knows what? Probably planning to go full WarGames on their asses. 

 

Kevin Flynn is into video games, he plays video games, he owns and operates an arcade, and tried to use his position at ENCOM to branch and develop his own video games, until the dastardly Dillinger took all the credit for his work and used to further his career and rise to the top of the company, securing the highest position of Senior Executive Vice President. That’s why Kevin Flynn has a grudge against the company, and is always trying to hack into their system, he hates Dillinger for stealing his ideas and is trying to gather evidence to prove that Dillinger stole his ideas. And ultimately, he’s successful since Dillinger loses his job as the Senior Executive Vice President of the company, and Kevin Flynn takes over, becoming the new boss man ♂︎ at the company at the end of the film. That explains that line at the beginning of Legacy where that security guard tells Sam Flynn that ENCOM is his dad’s company, it became his company after the events of this movie, because of what he did. Only it for it stop being his company once again after he gets trapped in the Grid by the C.L.U.. 

Speaking of C.L.U., that’s a character that, for the longest time, I had no idea was even in this movie until recently. All this time, I thought he was a brand new character created specifically for Legacy, and to have an excuse to use de-aging to have a young Jeff Bridges in the movie beyond just flashback scenes featuring Flynn, but no, he’s a character that was introduced all the way back in this movie. He is an original character from this movie, was a part of the Tron lore before Legacy came along. Legacy took him and expanded upon him, made him a real villain. C.L.U. didn’t start out evil of course, as he’s pretty much a good guy in this movie. Granted, we don’t see much of him since he’s just a physical representation of Flynn’s efforts to hack into Encom, and he gets caught and then derezzed by Sark (no not the British island territory 🇬🇧, Sark 🇨🇶, the evil program Sark), all of which happens at the beginning of this movie. Which kind of begs the question, if C.L.U. was derezzed at the beginning of this movie, how does he come back in Legacy? 

 

I assume he died there since that’s basically what deresolution means, if a program gets derezzed, they’re dead, gone forever. So, how did C.L.U. come back from being derezzed? How did he survive that? Unless Flynn recreated C.L.U. after the events of this movie to help improve the system and make it better, meaning that this isn’t technically the same C.L.U. that we see in Tron: Legacy. Whichever it is, tell me in the comments if any hardcore Tron fans who are really deep into the lore are reading this. But it is cool that instead creating an entirely new character to be the villain in Legacy, they simply brought back a character that hardly anyone thought about after seeing the first one and gave them a bigger and more important role. Kind of like Joseph Kosinski would end up doing with Penny Benjamin in Top Gun: Maverick, a character who we never even saw and was only mentioned by name once in a throwaway line (that was whispered mind you 🗣️👂) in the first Top Gun. 

C.L.U.’s voice here does sound different here than it would end up sounding like in Legacy, which may or may not be a clue (no pun intended) that they may not be the same character completely. Here, he talks with a robot voice, almost like Jeff Bridges was trying to sound like a robot when he was playing C.L.U., and apparently the voice he used for C.L.U. in this movie would be used again for when he played Starman in well, Starman, which was directed by John Carpenter BTW, the same guy ♂︎ who directed John Carpenter’s The Thing hence why it’s called that. This brings me to the cast of the movie. Everyone in the main cast plays a dual role in this movie, including the actor who played Lovejoy in Titanic (1997). Even the guy ♂︎ who plays Dumont is playing a dual role since he also plays Dr. Walter Gibbs, a scientist in the real world who works at Encom. He’s the one who created that digitizing device that Master Control uses to suck Flynn into the Grid, along with Dr. Lora Baines, who’s actress looks absolutely beautiful I must say 😍. 

 

I can see why Flynn and Alan are both in Lora, as well as Yori who is Lora’s computer program inside the Grid, and Alan’s computer program, Tron is in love with Yori and Flynn becomes infatuated by her also ❤️. She ends up kissing both of them, both Flynn and Tron. It gives the movie a sort of Wizard of Oz type quality to it where the characters in the real world and in the fantasy world (whatever that may be) are played by the same actors and are essentially the same people, which is probably what they were going for by having most of the actors in the movie play dual roles. Triple roles in the case of David Warner. The only actors who don’t play dual roles in this are the actors playing programs who don’t have real life counterparts that we see in the real world like Ram and that one compound interest program we meet at the beginning. And of course Master Control, who is just Master Control. He’s my favorite character in this by far, he’s a great villain. He has such a cool voice. David Warner did an excellent job voicing him. The man ♂︎ plays three different characters in this, Dillinger, Sark, and Master Control. They had him working overtime on this. Bruce Boxlietner looks like Clark Kent when he’s wearing glasses 👓 whenever he plays Alan, and he’s pretty awesome as Tron. 

 

This movie does a good job at showing how important Tron is and what makes him special from the other programs inside the Grid, especially since he’s in so little of Legacy and barely has any presence. He’s presumed dead for most of the movie, until the big twist of the movie that he wasn’t dead, he was just Rinzler, one of C.L.U.’s henchmen from the game arena, the whole time. C.L.U. corrupted him and turn him into Rinzler after their last confrontation inside the Grid, but because of the efforts of Quorra and the Flynns, he reverts back to being Tron again and starts fighting for the good guys again. It also does a good job at showing powerful Flynn is when he’s inside the Grid. 

 

Because he’s a user and not a program, he pretty much has godlike power inside the Grid, and can do pretty much whatever he wants. Legacy does this too, but we see Kevin Flynn do more godlike things in this movie than we do in Legacy. I wonder if the Wachowskis were in anyway inspired by this movie and the character of Flynn when they came up with the character of Neo in the Matrix films and how he becomes a godlike being inside the Matrix after he’s “resurrected” by Trinity’s kiss and fully embraces who he is and fully believes that he’s the One. At least until the Architect tells him that the One isn’t really real and is just an anomaly inside the Matrix that keeps popping up and they can’t get rid of, and the whole prophecy surrounding the One was a lie concocted to keep the humans in line and keep them imprisoned even after they escape from the Matrix. 

While most people will probably just think of the tie-in video game for Tron: Legacy, Tron: Evolution when they think of Tron games, this movie did actually have a tie-in video game of its own and did predate Tron: Legacy. It was called Tron 2.0, it came out in 2003 on PC and Mac OS, and in 2004 on GameBoy Advance and XBox. It was developed by Monolith Productions, the same studio behind the F.E.A.R. games, and its gameplay was heavily inspired by the first Half-Life, which, along with Halo: Combat Evolved, set a standard for story-based first person shooters. The events of the game are no longer considered canon of course since Tron: Legacy came along and decanonized it, and it pretty much exists in a separate alternate continuity from the rest of the Tron franchise. Though, it was meant to serve as a sequel to this movie. 

 

Sort of like how that 1997 Blade Runner point-and-click adventure game developed by Westwood Studios was meant to serve as a sequel to the 1982 Blade Runner movie, before it too was decanonized by the release of Blade Runner 2049. Though, in that case, there is a way you could conceivably still have the 1997 Blade Runner game still work within the continuity of the films, since the events of that game either happen congruently or after the events of the 1982 film, and 2049 takes place 30 years after the events of the original film. There was also the arcade game of Tron. Yeah, they took Tron, and made it into an actual coin operated arcade game. This was probably why some people thought that the game came first before the movie (including my dad), even though it was created specifically to promote the movie. Since then though, the actual physical arcade machine for Tron has become a collector’s item of sorts for hardcore fans, for people who like collecting movie related memorabilia, and for people who like collecting arcade machines. You gain a lot of swag or street credit so to speak if have one of them in your possession.