|
|
TRON (Green as a CRT)
|
Age is seldom kind to movies that depend on special-effects-based premises. The Lawnmower Man, tepid when it appeared, is unwatchable today, and even the ahead-of-its-time Star Wars -- sorry, Episode IV -- showed so many cracks in its dotage that director Lucas felt impelled to reissue it, remastered and tricked up with rococo animated scenery, and to expunge insofar as he could all trace of the previous, early-renaissance version.
Against this withering harsh light of high-definition revelation of imperfection there is the singularly underappreciated film Tron, about hacker game designer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot) who, in his quest to prove his best arcade game programs had been stolen by his nemesis Ed Dillinger (David Warner, Providence), breaks in to the physical computer:
Kevin Flynn: How are you going to control the universe if you can't answer a few unsolvable problems? Come on, big fella, let's see what you got.
Master Control Program: I'd like to go against you and see what you're made of.
Kevin Flynn: You know, you look nothing like your pictures.
Master Control Program: I'm warning you. You're entering a big error, Flynn.
[Manipulates dematerialization gun and targets Flynn]
and is in turn sucked, like Alice down the coaxial rabbit hole, into the network itself.
Kevin Flynn: Oh man, this isn't happening, it only thinks it's happening.
This basic concept was reworked, and in a form visually far superior and metaphysically more sophisticated, in The Matrix, and one might think the earlier work should suffer by comparison, with its only-sixteen-color palette, its sharp-edged non-contoured robots, and its limited bluescreen backgrounds -- but a funny thing happens; Tron more than holds its own, for in being the first to explore the electronic world, Tron is able to revel in all things reimagined. What makes the story delightful is not just the tried-and-true twin plots of Quest Against Villain and Boys Meet Girl but also a cohesively and wittily invented belief system, first presented to us as overheard dialog after Flynn has landed with a crash inside the game grid:
Crom: Look. This ... is all a mistake. I'm just a compound interest program. I work at a savings and loan. I can't play these video games!
Guard: Sure you can, pal. Look like a natural athlete if I ever saw one.
Crom: Who, me? Are you kidding? No, I run out to check on T-bill rates, I get outta breath. Hey, look, you guys are gonna make my user, Mr. Henderson, very angry. He's a full branch manager.
Guard: Great. Another religious nut.
If you were a program, wouldn't you believe in the users? The tweaking of religion is never expressed overtly but often teased:
Ram: Do you believe in the Users?
Crom: Sure I do! If I didn't have a User, then who wrote me?
Yet as the deists will be pleased to point out, in fact there are Users:
Master Control Program: He's not any kind of program, Sark. He's a User.
Sark: A user?
Master Control Program: That's right. He pushed me ... in the other world. Somebody pushes me, I push back. So I brought him down here ... What's the matter, Sark? You look nervous.
Sark: Well, I - it's just - I don't know, a User, I mean... Users wrote us. A User even wrote you ...
Master Control Program: No one User wrote me. I'm worth a couple million of their man-years.
That was the flourished entry of Ming the Merciless, the Master Control Program, megalomaniac and able to do something about it:
Ram: If he thinks you're useful, then he takes over all your functions. If not he sends you down to the game grid to get the bits blasted out of you.
Video death -- immediate de-resolution -- bears an eerie resemblance to the disintegration of the Wicked Witch of the East. Power has made the MCP arrogant:
Master Control Program: You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic.
Sark: Thank you, Master Control.
Yet comes the Hero -- or in fact two heroes, like Crosby and Hope:
A romantic lead (Tron, Bruce Boxleitner, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) all determination, honor, and courage:
Yori: I knew you'd escape. They haven't built a circuit that could hold you!
A wisecracking road-to-CPU buddy (Flynn), also attracted to Dorothy Lamour -- I mean, Lori (Cindy Morgan, more or less nothing before or since) -- who covers his feelings and his fears with jokes:
Kevin Flynn: [Zooms past a plethora of tanks on his lightcycle] I shouldn't have written all those tank programs.
Every hero also needs a comic-relief Sancho Panza (think Danny de Vito in Romancing the Stone). Enter a floating coruscating polyhedron:
[a Bit flies around Flynn's head in a Recognizer]
Kevin Flynn: Hey! Hold it right there!
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: What do you mean, "yes"?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Is that all you can say?
Bit: No.
Kevin Flynn: Know anything else?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Positive and negative, huh. You're a bit, aren't you?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Well, where's your program? Isn't he going to miss you?
Bit: No.
Kevin Flynn: I'm your program?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Another mouth to feed.
Bit: Yes yes yes yes!
Adventures are sustained not by explosions but by peril, character, and dialog, and Tron's dialog sparkles from beginning to end:
Crom: I mean, sending me down here to play games! Who does he calculate he is?
Like Star Wars, Tron honors its mythic and science-fictional forebears, and like the first Star Wars (but none of its successors) it never takes itself too seriously. Though anyone under the age of forty will roll her eyeballs at the simple graphics, they are so clean they unleash the power of imagination and sweep us along in a headlong story that entertains right up until the closing credits -- naturally in lime green on a black background, the color of a perfect monitor, vintage 1982.
David 2/28/07