Tron

Tron. 1982 Walt Disney Pictures.
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan, Barnard Hughes, Dan Shor
Director: Steven Lisberger
Tron is available on Disney DVD from Amazon. Tell 'em Clu sent you...

The origin of Tron dates back to 1976 when director Steven Lisberger became fascinated with the video game Pong, and he envisioned a movie based on video games. Originally intended to be a completely animated movie, Lisberger and producer Donald Kushner decided to incorporate live action sequences. Disney eventually green-lit the project after being rejected by several other Hollywood studios (Warner Bros., MGM, Columbia). At the time, Disney seldom employed outsiders to produce movies for them, so Lisberger and company were given less than a warm welcome by Disney employees. The finished product may look primitive and cheesy now, but in 1982, it was something else to behold.

Jeff Bridges is Kevin Flynn, a software engineer who is trying to hack into the mainframe of his former employers at ENCOM, seeking evidence that a senior executive named Ed Dillinger (Warner) stole his coding and passed it off as his own, leading to Dillinger's rapid rise in the company, and to Flynn being fired, taking a job running a video arcade filled with the games he wrote and designed. Flynn is blocked by the Master Control Program that controls ENCOM's mainframe. The same program is blackmailing Dillinger, threatening to reveal to the world that he truly stole Flynn's codes after the executive tried to halt the program from hacking into the Pentagon and Kremlin.

ENCOM employees Alan Bradley (Boxleitner) and Lora Baines (Morgan) drop by Flynn's arcade one night to tell him about Dillinger's new tighter security clearances after Flynn's attempts to break in. Flynn convinces them both to let him into ENCOM so he can get around the security clearances for Bradley's security program called "Tron" to monitor communications between the Master Control Program and the outside world. At the labratory, Flynn attempts to break into the system, but the MCP takes control of a nearby laser for "quantum teleportation", and digitizes Flynn into the ENCOM mainframe. Inside of the mainframe, Programs appear in the likeness of the real world Users who created them, but the MCP and its commander Sark (Warner) have run roughshod over the Programs, who have given up their belief in the Users, and the MCP has assumed near complete control over input and output within the mainframe.

While being forced to engage in gladitorial games where the loser is destroyed, Flynn meets Tron (Boxleitner), and the two escape deeper into the system during a Light Cycle match. The two are split up, but Flynn discovers that as a User, he can manipulate the physical laws of the digital world. With help from another program called Yori (Morgan), our digital heroes make their way to the core of the MCP and battle Sark. Sark is briefly destroyed, but he is restored by the MCP, which gives him all of its functions. After Flynn jumps directly into the MCP, it lets its guard down long enough for Tron to throw his disc into its core, destroying it and Sark, freeing the digital world. Flynn is then sent back to the real world, along with printed evidence that Dillinger has "annexed" his code. Dillinger arrives at work the next morning, finding the MCP non-functional and evidence of his crime displayed on his computer screen. Some time after this, Flynn becomes the CEO of ENCOM...

...until his disappearance in 1989, but that's a different movie, which will be reviewed here later this week.

Another great sci-fi classic movie that may look dated, but it's still great. Highly recommended.