Ah, me. The list of memories this Cray-assisted madeleine brings forth is practically endless. Watching clips on Screen Test before it came out! The many featurettes on the likes of Blue Peter, Nationwide and Film 82, featuring confident predictions that all films would be made this way in ten years’ time! Not being allowed to waste money on the related arcade games at Granada Services! The endless debate about whether Tron ice lollies actually existed! And, well, the inevitable disappointment on finally seeing the film and realising that, the bits you’d already seen fifty times over on the telly aside, it’s a pretty lousy watch as cinematic milestones go. Anyway, here it is easing into its dotage as pleasant, afternoon-filling holiday curio fare, with Jeff Bridges and Bruce ‘Bring ‘Em Back Alive’ Boxleitner doing the light cycling, Frisbee throwing bit as per. Stylised visual fun is here in abundance, but the best thing, of course, is the way the live action elements have been composited in so many layers they look like bad photocopies. The rather dreary music is by Journey, more notable for their pioneering tie-in Atari game Journey: Escape, wherein you guided band members past hordes of “love-crazed groupies” and “shifty-eyed promoters” to a sort of brown spaceship. Oh, and in an alternate world, there’s a version of Tron with Peter O’Toole and Debbie Harry instead of David Warner and Cindy ‘Bring ‘Em Back Alive’ Morgan, but we’ve a feeling that had that been made, we’d probably have “de-rezzed” with overexcitement on the spot.
Lee James Turnock
May 24, 2010 at 2:16 pm
Directed by Steven ‘Animalympics’ Lisberger shortly before he disappeared up his own arse.