The film directed by Steven Lisberger continues to have great symbolic value in spite of the somewhat “cheap” aspects and the flop at the box office
July 9, 1982 is a historic date for world cinema. Yet, the film released that day (and here only five months later, at Christmas) is nowhere near a masterpiece, it is not by a famous director (or later became famous) and it has practically not made a penny anywhere in the world. even though Disney had invested a lot of money in it. But “Tron” (over the years it has become a kind of “sub-cult” so much so that in 2010 Disney decided to give it a sequel entrusting it to Joseph Kosinski, now the leading director of the billionaire “Top Gun – Maverick”) represents a cornerstone indisputable technological: because for the first time a film entered the virtual videogame world thanks to (for the time) highly sophisticated sequences created entirely on the computer.
And also the subject, at the time, although declined according to traditional narrative canons in spite of its revolutionary significance, represented an absolute novelty. Genius video game software programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has opened an arcade to make his amazing creations available to the public; but to really make his fortune and career with his stolen ideas was his former boss Ed Dillinger (David Warner), CEO of the IT company Encom, who years ago, before firing him, took over several projects he developed . The evidence of this scam has always been contained in the computer systems of the multinational, guarded by the artificial intelligence known as MCP (Master Control Program) and its anti-intrusion programs from which Kevin is regularly rejected despite his attempts to infiltrate the corporate network. with another of his creations, the Codified Likeness Utility or CLU (Codified Likeness Utility), a sort of digital avatar of himself.
Helped by two Dilinger employees, Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) and Lora Baines-Bradley (Cindy Morgan), Kevin manages to break into the Encom database with them at night; but thanks to an experimental laser developed by the girl, MCP inflicts the worst of “punishments” for unauthorized access: digitizing it and breaking it down into a numerical string and then reintegrating it in the form of energy in the integrated circuits of the system. In this new electronic form, Kevin discovers that the computer network governed by MCP is a real parallel virtual “microverse” in which the programs he has developed are human-like synthetic beings (whose identity is contained in memory disks ) forced seamlessly to live and compete within the games in which they are protagonists. And he realizes that, thanks to his self-learning algorithms, MCP has almost developed a “consciousness” that has made him a sentient and authoritarian entity.
Allied with Tron, Alan’s digital alter ego, will be able to reach a free zone of the system where with the help of Yori, Lora’s alter ego, he will try to reach the “heart” of MCP to deactivate it. Without imagining that even the evil Dillinger acts within the virtual world under the guise of the ruthless commander Sark. He will be able to be right, free the system from the technological dictatorship of MCP, return in human form in the real world, prove to the world that he has been cheated and … become general manager of Encom. Written by the still carneade director (who in 1980 had debuted with the modest cartoon “The Jungle Olympics / Animalympics” and later will shoot only two other films of no interest), supported by a conceptual preparation work that also involved artists such as Syd Mead and the cartoonist Moebius and not surprisingly set to music by an authority of twentieth-century electronics such as Wendy Carlos, “Tron” did not have any immediate success.
Although the specialized American magazines of the time (such as Starlog or Fantastic Films, sources of unique and succulent advances for fans when the web did not yet exist) had begun for months to bombard the public with images and exclusive information on its work, underlining its innovative scope, something did not work: perhaps the ‘absence of a truly attractive cast (despite Bridges being already well known); or the lack, in fact, of an “Author” who could stand as guarantor of the project; or perhaps the somewhat “camp” aspect of the protagonists in the bizarre costumes of their digital counterparts seen a few months earlier in the flood of trailers that Disney submitted to US theaters. The fact is that the public (rightly) turned out to be more prejudiced than curious: and in a cinematic summer in which it seemed that anyone who wanted to see only the record pulverizer “ET the extra-terrestrial”, the film was one of the great defeated “competitors” (among other things, in very good company; because at the expense of Spielberg-mania there were also films now considered masterpieces / classics but which performed badly or very badly at the box office such as “The Thing” by John Carpenter, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian).
Although over time he has increased the ranks of his admirers, revised today “Tron” continues not only to not be perceivable in any measure even as a “good film” (it suffers from slowness, inadequate interpretations, terrifying narrative predictions, pushed cumbersome and an anti-authoritarian / anti-capitalist “message” false and old as the world ), but also puts an infinite tenderness. Because the sequences in which the very rudimentary computer graphics (made mostly in “wireframe” on black backgrounds with obviously very aged three-dimensional rendering effects) are few, even in the economy of an hour and a half film; and because everything that had to “mimic” the futuristic semblance of a virtual life within a digital universe (starting with the actors, forced to act in improbable printed circuit suits) was instead created for obvious reasons as a sort of experimental cartoon: the protagonists and the essential scenographies with contrasting contours were in fact filmed in black and white (to accentuate the prominence of the lines) and then colored (monochromatically or almost) by hand in post-production by a bevy of Taiwanese technicians.
Despite the substantial budget for the time (and the excellent sound design: it was one of the first films fully recorded in Dolby Stereo), the final effect it did to the audiences (and to the Academy: it didn’t even bring home the Oscar nomination for best special effects) was that of an incredibly cheap film: even if the hyperkinetic race of the “light cycles” with their ninety-degree steering on an electronic grid has made history in its own way, so much so that it has been one of the key elements (brought to the state of coeval digital art) of the sequel “Tron: Legacy” of 2010. However, while not going so far as to hypothesize that without “Tron” digital cinema would not have run its course, it is worth celebrating it for its symbolic rather than artistic value : that of a watershed film after which the technology of synthetic images applied to the seventh art would become a practice whose possibilities are still not fully explored today.
July 9, 2022 (change July 9, 2022 | 14:18)
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