sf-lovers (07/13/82)
>From JPM@Mit-Ai Tue Jul 13 04:38:50 1982
SF-LOVERS Digest Monday, 12 Jul 1982 Volume 6 : Issue 12
Today's Topics:
SF Movies - TRON
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Date: 10 Jul 1982 0125-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject: TRON
TRON
By JANET MASLIN
c. 1982 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK - ''Tron'' means to be a gloriously puerile movie, the
fullfledged screen embodiment of a video game. It even means to go to
the heart of video gamesmanship, and its premise is very promising in
its way. What if those tiny Space Invaders and Pac-Men were real
creatures, miniature gladiators sent to do battle for the amusement of
their heartless captors? What if a movie could capture the very spirit
of a computer toy and make it last not just for a few quarters' worth
of time, but indefinitely?
The lavish Walt Disney production ''Tron'' tries prodigiously to
do this, but its technological wizardry isn't accompanied by any of
the old-fashioned virtues - plot, drama, clarity and emotion - for
which other Disney movies, or other films of any kind, are best
remembered. It is beautiful - spectacularly so, at times - but dumb.
Computer fans may very well love it, because ''Tron'' is a nonstop
parade of stunning computer graphics, accompanied by a barrage of
scientific-sounding jargon. Though it's certainly very impressive, it
may not be the film for you if you haven't played Atari today.
''Tron'' was written and directed by Steven Lisberger, who works
in a passionate but choppy style, sometimes omitting the very basics
that ought to hold together a scene. It is a hard film to follow,
because Lisberger's script is an odd blend of technical terminology
and childish slang (''Are we almost there yet, Mommy?'' asks the
film's hero sarcastically at one point in the story's long
chase-adventure).
But it owes a little bit to ''Alice in Wonderland'' and a little
bit more to ''Journey to the Center of the Earth.'' It tells of
someone who ventures into a world that is a topsy-turvy version of his
everyday environment. And it places that world inside a seemingly safe
and familiar exterior, that of a computer.
Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is a smart-alecky scientist who has
developed in his spare time the program for Space Paranoids, a
computer game that makes money hand over fist. Kevin's employer, Ed
Dillinger, has appropriated the game. When Flynn tries to break into
the company computer to find evidence of Dillinger's theft, the
computer resents his intrusion and decides to show him who's boss. It
zaps him - the film has a more sophisticated term for this - and
transforms him into a tiny prisoner inside its own circuitry. The
actors from the film's real-world narrative - David Warner, Bruce
Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan and Barnard Hughes - all play double roles,
appearing as altered versions of themselves inside the computer world.
Dillinger, for example, has now become Sark.
Beyond this, the film gets rather hard to explain. As it follows
Flynn's efforts to escape from this electronic maze, it becomes a
series of breathless chases, which are presented as speedy, thrilling
computer animation. Flynn and a few other would-be escapees whiz
across a landscape of grids and mazes, accompanied by a soundtrack
filled with deafening crashes. Half the audience at one preview
screening kept their fingers in their ears during a large portion of
the movie.
Following the example of ''Star Wars,'' Lisberger tries to make
his heroes boyishly courageous, accompanying each act of derring-do
with a joke or a shrug, and transposing old-fashioned adventure movie
dialogue into a futuristic tale. If this looked easy and natural when
George Lucas did it, it doesn't here. The characters sound more goofy
than bold when they're forced to say things like, ''I knew you'd
escape - they haven't built a circuit that could hold you!'' And the
actors are further constrained by the mechanical side to their roles.
There are almost no scenes here that don't depend heavily on special
effects - effects added after the acting was done. How can the
performers keep from seeming as if they're acting in a void?
Anyone not discouraged by these drawbacks will find ''Tron'' a
wonder to behold. Its computer sequences exist in a blue-gray scheme
filled with flashing lights, speeding objects and dizzying motion.
Its visual effects are wonderfully new. They are also numbing after a
while. And how could they not be? They're loud, bright and empty, and
they're all this movie has to offer.
''Tron'' is rated PG (''Parental Guidance Suggested''). It
contains some slightly violent scenes.
------------------------------
Date: 10 Jul 1982 0126-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject: TRON
TRON
By Roger Ebert
(c) 1982 Chicago Sun-Times (Field News Service)
TRON, starring Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy
Morgan, Barnard Hughes and Dan Shor. 4 stars.
The interior of a computer is a fine and private place, and none,
I fear, do there embrace, except in ''Tron,'' a dazzling new movie
from Walt Disney in which computers have been used to make themselves
romantic and glamorous. This summer of 1982 has already caused the
most excitement among audiences in years, and now here's another
blockbuster to line up for, a technological sound-and-light show that
is sensational and brainy, stylish and fun.
The movie addresses itself without apology to the computer
generation. That generation includes, I suppose, onetime
typewriter-pounders like myself. I am writing this review on a
portable computer terminal in a New York hotel room, and when I am
finished, I will simply dial a number in Chicago and wed the computer
and the telephone in some kind of song and dance that will result in
these words being automatically set in type and appearing in the
paper.
That is enough of a miracle, right there, for me to accept almost
everything in ''Tron,'' but ''Tron'' goes one step farther and
embraces the imagery and gamesmanship of those arcade video games that
parents fear are programming the minds of their children.
If you've never played Pac-Man or Space Invaders or the new Tron
game itself, you probably are not quite ready to see this movie, which
begins with an evil bureaucrat stealing computer programs to make
himself look good, and then enters the very mind of a computer itself
to engage the villain, the hero and several highly programmable
bystanders in a war of the wills that is governed by the rules of both
video games and computer programs.
The villain is a man named Dillinger (David Warner). The hero is a
bright kid named Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who created the original
programs for five great new video games, including the wonderfully
named ''Space Paranoia.'' Dillinger stole Flynn's plans and covered
his tracks in the computer. Flynn believes that if he can track down
the original program, he can prove Dillinger is a thief. To prevent
that, Dillinger uses the very latest computer technology to break
Flynn down into a matrix of logical points and insert him INTO the
computer, and at that point ''Tron'' leaves any narrative or visual
universe we have ever seen before in a movie and charts its own rather
wonderful path.
In an age of amazing special effects, ''Tron'' is a state-of-
the-art movie. It generates not just one imaginary computer universe,
but a multitude of them . Using computers as their tools, the Disney
filmmakers literally have been able to imagine any fictional
landscape, and then have it, through an animated computer program.
And they integrate their human actors and the wholly imaginary worlds
of Tron so cleverly that I never, ever, got the sensation that I was
watching some actor standing in front of, or in the middle of, special
effects. The characters inhabit this world.
And what a world it is! Video gamesmen race each other at blinding
speed, hurtling up and down computer grids while the theater shakes
with the overkill of Dolby stereo (justified, for once). The
characters sneak around the computer's logic guardian terminals,
clamber up the sides of memory displays, talk their way past the
guardians of forbidden programs, hitch a ride on a power beam and
succeed in entering the mind of the very Master Control Program
itself, disabling it with an electronic Frisbee.
This is all a whole lot of fun. ''Tron'' has been conceived and
written with a knowledge of computers that it mercifully assumes the
audience shares. That doesn't mean we do share it, but that we're
bright enough to pick it up, and don't have to sit through long,
boring explanations of it. I have the strange feeling that ''Tron'' is
going to popularize a whole new language among its fans, and that,
just as we all learned the names of R2D2 and C3PO when ''Star Wars''
came out in 1977, so now we are going to be dividing ourselves up into
Users and Programs.
There is one additional observation I have to make about ''Tron,''
and I don't really want it to sound like a criticism: This is an
almost wholly technological movie. Although it's populated by actors
who are engaging (Bridges, Cindy Morgan) or sinister (Warner), it is
not really a movie about human nature. In fact, it knows about as much
about the weather of the soul as a - well, as a computer would. Like
''Star Wars'' or ''The Empire Strikes Back,'' but much more so, this
movie is a machine to dazzle and delight us. It is not a human-
interest adventure in any generally accepted way. That's all right, of
course. It's brilliant at what it does, and in a technical way 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.
------------------------------
Date: 10 Jul 1982 0126-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject: TRON
TRON
By RICHARD FREEDMAN
Newhouse News Service
(UNDATED) Finding yourself trapped in a Chinese bakery must be fun
compared with being trapped inside the video games of ''TRON.'' At
least in the bakery you can send out funny SOS messages concealed in
fortune cookies.
In ''TRON,'' on the other hand, you're in constant peril of
''deresolution'' - or, in layman's language, having the plug pulled
out from under you.
Deresolution of another sort is what this $20 million, high-tech
science fiction Disney spectacular itself suffers from. Like the Tin
Man in ''The Wizard of Oz,'' it's all shiny and metallic and lacks a
heart.
Written and directed by Steven Lisberger, ''TRON'' is
machine-tooled to woo kids away from video games and into movie
theaters, where they can exercise their fast reflexes and mechanical
ingenuity beating the popcorn machine.
It borrows not only from ''The Wizard of Oz,'' but from ''Alice in
Wonderland,'' ''Star Wars,'' the story of David and Goliath and
computer jargon as well.
It is fast and noisy and visually striking. Because no human
character in it is of any interst whatever, it is also deadly dull -
proving once again that while computers may think better than we do,
as yet they're not big on feeling.
It is, in short, the ultimate special-effects movie - full of
sound, fury and whizzing cars that look like a cross between phone
receivers and Norelco shavers - but signifying precious little about
the human condition.
Only 53 of the film's 96 minutes take place inside a video game.
The rest concerns the efforts of brilliant ''software engineer'' Flynn
(Jeff Bridges), inventor of such benefits to mankind as ''Space
Paranoia,'' to get back what is rightfully his - the patents to such
games from the aptly named Dillinger (David Warner), who filched them
to get to the top of a communications conglomerate.
Aiding Flynn are Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), eccentric old
scientist Gibbs (Barnard Hughes) and his lissome aide Lora (Cindy
Morgan).
With his frosty Bill Buckley smile, Dillinger is afraid of nobody.
He is awed only by the god of the circuitry universe, Master Control
Program, who looks like a pond of ice about to crack up and speaks in
the sepulchral tones of HAL, the computer in ''2001: A Space
Odyssey.''
In the video game world, only TRON (Boxleitner again, now
transformed into a digital security program) defies this vengeful
deity.
Dillinger has become the ultimately evil Sark, who loves nothing
better than sending his goonish ''grid bugs'' in pursuit of hapless
players and electrocuting them with what seems enough electricity to
carry Buffalo, N.Y., through one of its epic winters.
It's good to know that in the face of such consummate,
computerized evil, the great American bust in the jaw still carries
some clout, as Flynn wins not only the girl, but presumably his video
game patents in the bargain.
The ''state of the art'' computerized graphics make all this fun
to watch - for about half an hour. After that, even computer freaks
may want to head for the local arcade to cope with the real thing
instead of the chaotic but dramatically sterile video game that takes
up most of ''TRON.''
''TRON.'' Disney super-spectacular science-fiction epic about
being trapped inside a video game. The computerized graphics are
breathtaking to behold - until the crushing banality of the
comic-strip characters and situation begin to make one long for a game
of old-fashioned checkers. Rated PG. Two and a half stars.
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End of SF-LOVERS Digest
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