Part of Midnight Movies
One of the earliest feature films to reflect the video-game craze of the 1980s, Disney’s TRON stars Jeff Bridges as computer programmer Kevin Flynn, who becomes part of the very game that he’s programming. Flynn’s principal antagonist is his glory-grabbing boss, Ed Dillinger (David Warner), who likewise metamorphoses into a video-game character. The title character, a computer-generated superhero, is played by Bruce Boxleitner. Though antiquated by today’s standards, TRON’s outrageously outlandish graphics make for a truly strange piece of retrofuturistic psychedelia.
"For most people, TRON's importance is as a historical footnote. It's the Model T of our CGI age. But the film's fans are passionate ones." —Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly “That summer [1982], cinemagoers were catapulted into the digital future. Few appreciated it at the time but with 40 years’ hindsight, Steven Lisberger’s sci-fi adventure TRON was the shape of things to come: in cinema, in real life, and in virtual life…. ‘We were the bridge from analogue to digital, and that is a unique thing,’ says Lisberger. Now in his 70s, the director likens making Tron to pushing a crude aeroplane over a cliff then working out how to make it fly on the way down. ‘It was unlike any other movie that had been made, and no movie will ever be made like this again.’” —Steve Rose, The Guardian “...Maybe it's breaking ground for a generation of movies in which computer-generated universes will be the background for mind-generated stories about emotion-generated personalities. All things are possible.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Jan 1, 1982)
