Tron (1982)

It's another slow day, so lucky you, another review. Given that Tron legacy will be in the cinema shortly I thought that it would be prudent to recap on the original.

If you like weak film premises, this is the Disney classic for you. Tron was essentially an excuse for Disney to try out all their cutting edge technology (a bit like the US in Vietnam. Controversial). This in mind, cast yourself back into the year 1982. It was the year King Fahd came to the throne of Saudi Arabia, Jean-Loup Chretien was the first French man in space, Princes Grace of Monaco died when her car hurtled off a cliff and many more unforgettable events. But more importantly everyone was going crazy for computers and Tron looked to cash in on this.

Kevin Flynn (played by the delicious Jeff Bridges) is a twenty something computer programmer who has been black-balled (marginalised) at the company he works for by, all round bastard, Ed Dillinger (David Warner). Dillinger takes credit for all of Flynn's work, earning himself several wondrous promotions and resigning Flynn to the scrap heap (metaphor). An increasingly indignant Flynn decides to hack into his company's mainframe (it's a technical term, you wouldn't understand) in order to expose Dillinger for the (all round) bastard that he is, long story short, Dillinger thwarts (stops) him. Unperturbed (look it up) Flynn tries again, this time with the help of another co-worker (a nice one, with a girlfriend), and gets into some sort of basement laser laboratory (with thousands of grey pipes!) where the company have been busy turning real things into digital things (for some reason). Low and behold, something goes wrong, for some reason or another Flynn is sucked into the computer.

This is where the film really picks up, going from ordinary visual to a less whacked out version of inside the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (a bit like if everything was made of Neon and it was always night time).
Flynn (in a truly fantastic glowing jump suit and a helmet much like the ones you see less intellectually agile children in) is near instantly captured in this digital world and taken to a holding cell.

There are several other characters entering the narrative at this point, but to be honest most of them do not need names. You need to know Sark, who looks like Dillinger and is a (all round) bastard and Tron, who looks like that other guy with the girlfriend and also has a girlfriend that looks like that guys girlfriend. Got it? Great.

Flynn (still in that cell, or round abouts) find himself in the middle of some quasi-religious power struggle, between the followers of the users (the good guys, they make documents open when we click on them) and the followers of the MCP (its like a self aware computer thing that think people are a waste of time). At the moment, as in any film worth its salt, the good guys are down on their luck, getting imprisoned and being forced to fight to the death (pretty standard stuff). So Sark (bad guy) offers each of the prisoners a chance to join the winning team of fight to the death with Frisbees. Flynn, as a rational person, chooses the Frisbee.

This game is one of the highlights of the movie. Two players, each with a disc and panels on the floor that erode if said disc hits them. Each player takes it in turns to twat their disc at the opponent. Not really worth describing it blow for blow, so I won't. Flynn wins, other guy 'de-rezzed' (killed, essentially).

Now Flynn meets Tron and runs off (somehow) and Sark sends some bricker-brack after the two of them (and also Tron's girlfriend a bit). They have all sorts of adventures, be they sailing on beams of light, blowing chunks out of poorly design tanks or (my favourite, also probably everyone's favourite, sorry to be so trite) killing bad guys on motor bikes with your own motor bike's digital snail trail.

Eventually they make it to the MCP (big, scary computer) and after they are done looking at just how poor the animation is in this part of the film compared to the rest, blow it up a bit and all the world turns blue again (blue is a good thing, it was all red and evil before, probably should have mentioned that earlier). Then Flynn is sent back to the real world (for some reason) where all of Dillinger's (remember him?) wrong doings are printing out loudly on a dot matrix. All is well in the end... Ah, Disney.

In summary, great film if you like bright colours and non-sensical plot developments. If you like a carefully constructed narrative and believable characters and a bit of gore (rather than just strobe lighting when people/files die) this is not for you.

Well, that is it for today, if you have any suggestions for films that you think I should review, just let me know.