Tron belongs on the very short list of big-budget special effects movies that no one ever tried to imitate. Its ultra-80s digital depiction of an old school arcade game come to life is all its own. You can’t mistake it for anything else no matter how many martinis you’ve had.
The story is pretty good, too. It’s classic adventure junk. There’s a Big Evil Force with a plan for world domination. Then there are the Underdog Good Guys who have to stop it. We’ve seen it all before, but this time the villain is an overly ambitious computer program and most of the movie is set inside the mainframe computer of a big video game company. It’s a whole other dimension run by a Darth Vader-like predatory ruler. Jeff Bridges gets sucked into it after the incorporeal bad guy catches him trying to hack into the system, but Bridges has a special talent. He helped write the program, so he’s uniquely equipped to survive in its internal world when it tries to kill him.
It’s an entertaining time-killer that rips off all of the right stuff from all the right movies, but in a neon day-glo 80s package with a swirly synthesizer score by Wendy Carlos. There’s a heaping spoonful of Star Wars and a generous dose of The Wizard of Oz while they’re at it (the programs inside the mainframe are depicted as human forms with the face of their creator, so actors from the “real” world here—playing programmers—also show up in the “computer world” as the programs that they wrote, a la The Wizard of Oz where the supporting cast play two roles in two different worlds).
Every piece written about this film here in our cozy 21st century cyber-bubble of useless and inaccurate information says that Tron bombed when it came out 1982, but I remember it being popular. Okay, I was five years old at the time and not a subscriber to Variety, but I had my ear to the ground in my own way. On the swings during recess in first grade, this was one of those movies that we talked about. Here I am still talking about it!