From: utzoo!decvax!cca!Hamilton.ES@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.movies Title: TRON reviews (long msg): Janet Maslin, Roger Ebert, Richard Freedman Article-I.D.: sri-unix.2106 Posted: Fri Jul 16 15:17:04 1982 Received: Sun Jul 18 01:20:02 1982 Thanks to Ron Newman, who forwarded these from SF-Lovers. (To get on SF-Lovers, add yourself to XeroxSFLovers^.pa) --Bruce ------------------------------ Mail-from: Arpanet host BRL rcvd at 13-JUL-82 0349-PDT Date: Saturday, July 10, 1982 10:23PM From: Jim McGrath (The Moderator) Reply-to: SF-LOVERS at Mit-Ai Subject: SF-LOVERS Digest V6 #12 To: SF-LOVERS at Mit-Ai Via: Mit-Ai; 13 Jul 82 4:27-EDT Via: Brl-Bmd; 13 Jul 82 4:38-EDT SF-LOVERS Digest Monday, 12 Jul 1982 Volume 6 : Issue 12 Today's Topics: SF Movies - TRON ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 10 Jul 1982 0125-PDT From: Jim McGrath 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 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 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. ------------------------------ End of SF-LOVERS Digest *********************** ---------------------------------------------------------------- Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com