Tron is one of those movies that comes in with a fresh new idea with incredible world-building and mind-blowing effects that are debatable if they still hold up to today’s standard. Yet even with all the right ideas in all the places, the film wasn’t met with the amount of praise it was hoping to expect at the time. However, this movie would soon afterward become influential with an ever-growing loyal fan base, a sequel decades later, and the fact that it was a pioneer for the start of computer animation.
Just a heads up this story is rather complicated so I’ll try to get as much of the story information as I possibly can. From what I can gather, Kevin Flynn is an owner of an Arcade and is trying to hack into a former company he used to work for called ENCOM which is run by Ed Dillinger. When some of ENCOM’s co-workers come to warn Flynn about Dillinger’s suspicions, Flynn fesses up that Dillinger has been secretly stealing his ideas, and his only reason for hacking being that he wants to prove that Dillinger was plagiarising so he could rise his company to power. Flynn gets the help of the co-workers to break into the company and access the system to retrieve the files. Unfortunately, he gets caught by Dillingers MCP who has been busy acquiring information from illegal sources behind Dillingers back. The MCP proceeds to digitize Flynn into the Tron system. It is there where he meets programs and begins to participate in deadly games. Flynn tries to escape the program with the help of some programs so he can confront the MCP and stop it from getting too powerful.
This movie has all the ingredients for an original Sci-Fi experience. The world of Tron is super unique and it is interesting to explore even despite how complicated it can turn out to be from time to time. I really do mean complicated because there are a lot of things this movie likes to throw at you and it can be kinda hard to breathe everything in as this movie goes at a mostly fast pace. The actual story is a little off-putting as it sounds very interesting but they don’t quite execute everything to the fullest as there are a lot of subplots and character arcs that end up feeling unfinished or just not interesting enough. The characters are hard to keep track of especially in the Tron world because the main character is wearing the same suits as every other Tron user and I can only tell the red ones apart from the blues ones. It makes it confusing on who to follow and what their personality was.
The visual effects are truly a marvel and while they may not hold up to today’s CGI effects, these were still groundbreaking for their time and opened people’s eyes to what computer animation can do. The story and characters might not be the movie’s strong suit, but their worldbuilding and Ideas are. The Tron world is super colorful and is filled with interesting vehicles and a different variety of games the users compete in. Every inch of the screen is littered with blues and blacks to emphasize the world’s uniqueness compared to many other Sci-Fi movies. Even with how complicated some of the story and character arcs can be, it can be forgiven to an extent with how detailed the world of Tron is on a visual level.
Tron may not be the greatest live-action Disney movie, but it may just be one of the most unique projects I’ve seen a company like Disney take on. Its somewhat complicated story and characters definitely could have been improved, but the world-building is so unique and such a visual marvel that I can’t help but still love what it attempted to do even if not everything worked. It still was a game-changer as it ushered in a new way of looking at visual effects which go on to inspire many talented artists in the future.
(Final Grade: B+)