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movie review - Tron

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Yes, it's that early '80s Sci-Fi standard. Jerky, bizarre colours and outrageous costumes. A simple, good versus evil (I just pretended the bad guy was Lotus Notes - I suggest you substitute your least favorite software for the Central Command Unit).

The movie revolves around Bridges' struggle to 'regain' some game software code that he wrote on the evil corporate employer's time and hardware (e.g. the company's code, according to the IP rights laws of all known universes). Bridges is a whiz at computer games, and the several that he wrote would have made him millions. So he's a) an introvert that looks and acts like Jeff Bridges and b) good at computer games.

When he enlists his ex and her new beau (Boxleitner) to break into the company's premises and then into the computer network, he's zapped by the computer's lasers, and sucked into the computer. There, the core badguy software makes what is perhaps the biggest of the kill-him-through-a-clever-but-doomed-means ploys ever recorded to film; it has its minions try to destroy Bridges through defeating him in... video games.

Needless to say, he escapes immediately, and gets to race around in a collection of amusing vehicles in his gambit to overcomes Evil.

This movie came out in 1982, back when the Star Wars trilogy was still incomplete, and E.T. was in the theatres. The technology that it depicts may have beenmostly nonsense, but it's an amusing look back at how people had to string together special effects twenty years ago.

P.S. We saw this 'cos, after twenty years, they're making a sequel!

Recommended.