Tron

Release Date: July 9, 1982

Watch Date: November 8, 2023

“When brilliant video game maker Flynn (Jeff Bridges) hacks the mainframe of his ex-employer, he is beamed inside an astonishing digital world…and becomes part of the very game he is designing. In his mission through cyberspace, Flynn matches wits with a maniacal Master Control Program and teams up with Tron, a security measure created to bring balance to the digital environment.”

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    Bob wanted to watch Tron: Legacy. But you can’t watch the sequel without watching the original, that’s sort of one of the unbreakable rules of this marathon. He argued that Tron: Legacy was a remake, not a sequel but a literally two-second long Google search proved that immediately untrue. So we had to watch Tron. When I mentioned it offhand to my mother, she was excited, “Oh I love Tron!”.

    Bob and I have both watched Tron exactly one time in our lives. Separately. Bob watched it as the result of losing a bet, he can’t remember what the bet was or why watching Tron was considered punishment. I watched it because…I figured it was a classic Disney movie and I should. Both of us walked away less than impressed. We were, absolutely, not looking forward to watching this film. While Bob likes it, stylistically, we remembered the plot as incredibly boring, and obviously you can’t watch one of the first heavy uses of CGI of all time, and not think it’s a little bit cheesy.

    And all those things remained true!

    While we definitely found it more entertaining to watch this film together, it’s hard to differentiate characters because the style of the digital world, while iconic, is kind of washed out and beyond some slight differences in costume and physicality, I couldn’t tell you the difference between Ram and Tron if you asked me to. The plot is also extremely convoluted, which comes, I think, from trying to make an incredibly complex world of digital creations make sense to non computer programmers. I doubt lay peoples understanding of just how computers worked was extremely vast in 1982, so you have to be both basic enough for people to grasp it, but also complicated and futuristic sounding while actually still referencing real things that happen in computer systems or it seems like a fake. So I have no idea how the world the programs live in operate.

    I couldn’t tell you what the MCP’s main ‘evil’ plan was. I guess to have ultimate knowledge? To run the world? Dillinger is an idiot though. He designed MCP, and worked with him, and the program legitimately threatened to infiltrate both the Pentagon and the Kremlin and he wasn’t going to do anything to stop it, though he could have, because the MCP might reveal he hadn’t invented a couple of video games and might lose his job? I would hope that that’s just a poorly written character, and not a choice most people would make when faced with the potential beginning of an AI apocalypse. I hope.

    Also, what was the point of Sark? I guess he’s good at videogames, but then, what does the user do? I’ve seen people playing these games, but, isn’t completely up to happenstance if the programs MCP wants to remove or Sark win, or is it just an illusion of how well the user is playing the games. Also, what happens to these games once the MCP isn’t basically sending slaves out to die? Will you show up to play Lightcycle and find that your character simply does not appear on screen? These might be stupid questions that have nothing to do with the film, but I want to know them.

    Ultimately, I think we enjoyed this film a lot more than we did from our weird first viewing experiences. We laughed at Dumont’s giant helmet, and we made fun of bad CGI, even if it was brilliant and impressive for the time. We wondered and just who Lora, and Yori, were in a relationship with and we were annoyed by the abrupt end to the film that implies a conclusion but doesn’t actually give you the satisfaction of one. I can see why it’s a cult classic, and I can see why it’s become an iconic piece of cinematography. But it’s not something I’d willingly watch again, and now that we’ve watched it once for the marathon, I’ll never have to again; and that alone makes me quite happy.