Movie Review: Tron (1982)

Tron is definitely more interesting than it is good. While it was a huge technical achievement in 1982 for its visual effects, for its sound design, today, it’s downright ugly.

I guess it’s pretty nice to look at when there aren’t people on screen, and while the movie was so groundbreaking, the look of the movie — again, minus the people and the costumes — is actually refreshingly simple.

The story is definitely lacking, and it’s probably only a story that could have been made when it was, when video games were relatively new, and when the home computer was basically just speculative.

Jeff Bridges plays software engineer and former video game developer Kevin Flynn, who gets pulled into a digital mainframe of some sort, and that’s where the movie loses me a bit. It’s kind of your typical fantasy hero’s journey, but I have no idea what the characters are trying to do in the grand scheme of things. In the normal world, it involved exposing Ed Dillinger’s (David Warner) plagiarism, but now, I’m not so sure.

The movie’s okay. It would have benefited from a much better score (which I understand the reboot has, of course), as what’s there is just lame and kind of annoying in spots. It’s a hard movie to hate because it is so interesting and innovative, but it’s also a fairly hard movie to enjoy overall because it’s just so awkward and ugly.

Rating: 5/10