TRON is either the first brilliant cinematic exploration of the digital world … or the silliest. Released by Disney in 1982 — over a year before the Apple Macintosh brought the graphical user interface home to consumers — TRON fascinated some, but confused most. You could argue that, alongside works like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, it ingeniously predicted a whole interconnected world behind the computer screen. You could also argue that — by portraying that world as a pseudo-Oz where people wear neon skintight bodysuits and say like “Who do you calculate you are?” — TRON got everything completely wrong. But you can’t argue with one thing: TRON is one of the strangest movies ever made. As the long-awaited sequel TRON: Legacy is released in lavish IMAX 3-D, we look back to the film that started a digital effects revolution.

Keith Staskiewicz: I’m pretty sure we both enjoyed this movie a lot more than we were expecting, seeing as it pretty much perfectly fits the mold of a movie that you wouldn’t think would age well, i.e. special effects-driven, about technology, made in the Eighties. Yet somehow the special effects and set design are still so distinct even today that it feels fresher than some movies made 10-15 years later, which helps to make up for the fact that the story is basically nonexistent and the filmmakers appear to have about as much knowledge of computers as my 86-year-old grandmother who thinks she needs a stamp for an e-mail.

Darren Franich: I think when we look at the history of digital effects in the last 30 years, there is a tendency to assume that they’ve been consistently getting better, and that thinking usually comes from the fact that most things that once looked incredible now look silly. But honestly, even though the effects in TRON are much less “realistic” than, say, Gollum in Lord of the Rings, they’re still remarkably effective. Yes, there are chase scenes where the evil flying blocks are chasing the brave bike-blocks, and the effects’ quality is roughly the equivalent of a 12-year-old’s computer-animation YouTube project. But they work: I felt totally invested in every brave blue block, and totally despised every evil red block.

KS: The whole movie is essentially an abstraction. The fact that they go for the blue-and-neon color scheme helps it from feeling hopelessly Eighties. They smartly avoided the deadly temptation of pastels. READ FULL STORY »