Cast:
Jeff Bridges (Kevin Flynn / Clu), Bruce Boxleitner (Alan Bradley / Tron), David Warner (Ed Dillinger / Sark / Master Control Program), Cindy Morgan (Dr. Lora Baines / Yori), Barnard Hughes (Dr. Walter Gibbs / Dumont), Dan Shor (Roy Kleinberg / Ram), and Peter Jurasik (Crom) Directed by Steven Lisberger.
Review:
“Tron is so idealistic. It was the digital frontier and we were seeing it and exploring it for the first time. We were very, very idealistic and you can feel that when you watch ‘Tron.’”
The art of making a good film, or at the very least a memorable one, comes from how one uses their imagination and circumstances to get there. Born in New York City but raised in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, Steven Lisberger studied at Tufts University within its Fine Arts school, where he soon formed an animation studio that bore his name. Their first animation project in Cosmic Cartoon earned a Student Academy Award nomination in 1973, and the studio eventually made a handful of projects such as commercials, title sequences, and feature segments. Probably the most noted production the studio did was Animalympics, a series of two specials commissioned by NBC to pair with both the 1980 Winter and Summer Olympics (one special worked out better than the other, but the studio did cobble together a theatrical version for overseas and home video), which had a staff of animators with connections to bigger and better things (such as animator Brad Bird and art director Roger Allers) along with slight connections to Tron. Lisberger would direct two further features after the release of Tron in Hot Pursuit (1987) and Slipstream (1989), although neither approached the audience curiosity of Tron (he of course would serve as a producer on the eventual release of Tron: Legacy in 2010). Lisberger had seen the potential for computer animation with the video game Pong in the last 1970s that came from a sample reel from a computer firm, which went nicely with the creation of a backlit neon character for an advertisement for a radio station by Lisberger and company. The effects presented here feature use of computers that could only give you static images that resulted in coordinates for each image having to be entered in for each image in say, a light cycle. The movie is actually a hybrid of animation and live-action rather than just a movie of computers (there is 15-20 minutes of actual computer animation in a 96-minute movie), what with the use of hand-animation and filming certain characters with light sources to go alongside backlight and diffusion (take a look at the actual look of the suit without the glowing colors sometime) and special animation cels with Kodaliths. On a level of costumes and sound, folks were dazzled by its execution, for which the film won two Academy Awards while being shut out for effects because of a perception that the film cheated by using computers. The influence of Tron can't be understated in the four decades since its release, with John Lasseter being quoted as saying that without Tron, there would not have been Toy Story (1995).
In a summer of movies such as The Thing, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and E.T., Tron was only a mild success with audiences, making $50 million on a $17 million budget. You know, it is entirely possible that the best audience for this movie is a teenager in 1982. For one, they certainly would gawk at the dazzling spectacle that came from computers and believe it to be one of the best creations of its time in an era where Walt Disney Productions actually tried making movies with some sort of daring sensibility. Now, I imagine if you show the movie forty years later, one will try to consider the fact that spectacle goes only so far for a movie that seems to consider what would happen if your Pong console had people in it. Of course, Lisberger wrote this movie in a time when IBM was the dominant technology company to go along with being a spiritual allegory as his parents (both half-Jewish) had died when he was young. The film was written by Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird. MacBird had done multiple drafts and outlines before numerous writers ended up dabbling into the script, as she did not have involvement with the production of the movie after the script had been sold to Disney (for her part, she had written the film with Robin WIlliams in mind for the lead while having the themes of the folly of hubris to go along with the danger of going along with the status quo). So, with an interpretation of Alice in Wonderland with computers, particularly since every main actor is playing a double role, how does it hold up? Your mileage may vary, depending on one's patience. Some of the amazement I had when I first saw it a decade ago is still there, but it definitely is a movie that lives on the strength of presenting its effects and world more than any great acting or general coherence. Bridges is and always was a tremendous presence with charm to spare, which means he does just fine with the hodgepodge of whirring lights that might as well make one seem lost in the land of electronic Oz. Boxleitner and Morgan have the trouble of being key leads that are separated from Bridges for a portion of time that barely make a distinction from surface to computer characters. It is amusing that it is Boxleitner who is playing an electronic gladiator, which works out to the minimum in stirring interest; Morgan is just kind of there for the ride, with even Hughes seeming more interested in the experience of being the pseudo Wizard of Oz. Warner does pretty well in the corporate/computer stooge role because he excels in generating ooze to counteract the others playing Oz for some sort of meaningful fun. I give the effects credit for the time and effort taken to try and create a computerized world, one that seems to serve as a first step in further movies built on the steps of CG to create further inventive worlds to immerse oneself in, for better or worse. The plot is a jumble, one that tries to play parable while trying to fascinate the viewer about the world of computers in a time when a good chunk of people either didn't know how to use one or were scared by it. This results in a decent movie that happens to look prophetic in the age of computers where one can type sentences out from one's lap. In that sense, Tron is the ideal hybrid movie after four decades because of what it ventures to show within a scramble of ideas and views, living and dying on how much one cares for its execution- take that for its splash of idealism.
Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment