One of my favourite films and this Summer is its fortieth anniversary. It is no great work of genius but as a visual approach that was to remain hugely influential it is up there with Metropolis, or 2001 or a range of others. And while far from the most thoughtful effort to engage with the issues, as the Guardian notes in this interview with director Steve Lisberger, who :
….that summer [of 1982], cinemagoers were catapulted into the digital future. Few appreciated it at the time but with 40 years' hindsight, Steven Lisberger's sci-fi adventure Tron was the shape of things to come: in cinema, in real life, and in virtual life. As a piece of entertainment, it is admittedly no classic, but thematically, Tron anticipates issues we are still grappling with today: artificial intelligence, digital identity, privacy, personal data, the dominance of big tech. Tron was also the first attempt to visualise the digital realm itself – what was then called "cyberspace" but might now be termed "the metaverse". Tron's cyber-world looks quaintly low-res by today's standards – a minimalist, angular, black-and-neon environment resembling a 1980s nightclub – but its distinctive retro chic is still much cherished and mimicked.
Compare and contrast with Ready Player One - a more recent film that covers much of the same ground and yet does it so poorly that by the end of it I was wondering had Spielberg (a director who after the mid-1980s has had a much more variable career than is sometimes acknowledged, I'd suggest) actually had any input at all. There was also a so so sequel to Tron in the last ten or fifteen years but that sort of dropped the ball on the more novel aspects of the original.
Tron has a purity about it that slots it in with those earlier films I mention. It is spare to the point of simplistic. It is a classic adventure, albeit positioned within then high technology.
Tron also anticipated the digital future of film-making. It was the first movie to incorporate lengthy sequences of entirely computer-generated imagery (CGI) – a then-unprecedented 15 minutes' worth. Nobody had seen anything like it. As such, Tron paved the way for the current era of digitally enhanced spectacle, influencing film-makers such as James Cameron, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, the Wachowskis (The Matrix bears many similarities to Tron) and former Pixar chief John Lasseter, who once said: "Without Tron there would be no Toy Story."
One discovers that Lisberger and co-writer Bonnie MacBird visited Xerox Parc which had hosted Steve Jobs in the same month in 1979, the place where graphical user interfaces were being developed.
And a political angle? Of course there is a political angle. There is always a political angle.
Good things came out of the computing revolution, Lisberger acknowledges, but in retrospect, his techno-utopianism proved somewhat misplaced.
"Tron is so idealistic: 'If we just get the tools into the hands of people, then democracy is assured for all time,'" he says. "The irony is that the computer has been used to just damn-near overthrow democracy! If someone had said: 'If we put these tools into the hands of the public, it's going to result in endless conspiracy theories, misinformation, lack of civility, endless rivers of porn, and the most violent video games you could ever imagine,' we would have said: 'Oh, no way. It's going to be wonderful!' It turns out we can predict the tools of the future but we can't really predict the philosophies or the ethics of the future."
Speaking of TRON, David Warner, who had a key role in the film passed away only this last week.
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