Tron
dir. Stephen Lisberger
Disney

So you have this job, and the office LAN suddenly won't let you on. You can't get any work done, let alone read the latest e-mail forward, check Espn.com, or load anything from the K: drive. Do you:

a) Take it up with Bryce, the network admin who wears henleys.

Or

b) Track down disgruntled ex-employee Jeff Bridges at his swank downtown video arcade and ask him how to break into the system, hoping to find incriminating evidence against the boss.

If you are characters in Disney's Tron (barely remembered by most people, but recently released as a Special Edition DVD) you go with B. If this seems ridiculous, it's because you're computer literate in a way few moviegoers were in 1982. Tron bombed at the box office because it asked questions no one was ready for. Oh, and because it's slow, and the acting is wooden, the plot unfolds in a completely inept way and it had to compete in the best summer for sci-fi movies in history, going up against Blade Runner, E.T. and Star Trek II. But it's also the most forward-thinking movie about computers ever made.

Computers were once seen as wellsprings of godlike possibility. See what happens in the next year's Superman III, when BASIC programmer Richard Pryor programs a computer drunk: the universe goes crazy. All across Metropolis, WALK and DON'T WALK stick figures break loose and wrestle each other. And in the 1984 comedy Electric Dreams, wine spilled into a Digital Equiment Corporation VT turns it into a romantic rival who seduces the user's next-door-neighbor.

Tron is about this kind of awakening — something you couldn't imagine happening under the watchful eye of your faithful Windows XP interface, as your Microsoft program patrols every operation of your computer, enforcing iron-plated predictability.

Which brings us to why Tron is the most important computer movie ever made.

Tron imagines that every computer program has a soul, a being living in virtual reality — a confusing idea in 1982, but familiar in these days of 3D chat avatars and Sims and the word "cyberspace." An accounting program, for example, takes the form of a nerdy little man. And since it's an '80s movie, he works for a savings and loan.

Grim developments in Computerland: an electronic dictator has taken over. The Master Control Program (a CG villain, frightening in its gaping featurelessness) monitors everything that happens in the computer world. As dreaded machines called Recognizers patrol the skies with searchlights, our software creations are being fed to the lions on the Game Grid below. They're forced to fight in deadly video games, throwing deadly discs at each other until they recant belief in the Users, or die (to die, in Tron Talk, is to be "de-rezzed.") That is, until their hacker savior Flynn (Jeff Bridges in devil-may-care mode) descends into the world of his creations to save them.

But Tron is more than a gladiator movie with echoes of the New Testament. It's also a movie that asked, at the dawn of the Information Age: who will control your computer?

Tron is named for its hero, a kind of Che Guevara of the software world ("Babylon 5"'s Bruce Boxleitner) who vows to "make this a free system again." What he's fighting for is freedom of information. In 1982, audiences wondered why they should care, but in 2002 that tug-of-war is all around us. Will the Internet stay wild and free, or will giant media companies control where you can go, what mathematical codes you can crack and what you can publish? How far will copy-protection go to limit what we can do with our DVDs and TV signals?

And who's going to control your computer, anyway? Microsoft — or you?

The heavy in Tron is Dillinger (David Warner), CEO of a video game company called Encom. When this movie was made, Bill Gates was a little-known nebbish. But today, it's hard not to draw parallels. Like Gates, Dillinger has become rich on the basis of someone else's programs. In this case it's the hit video game "Space Paranoids."

But what's the price of power? In Dillinger's executive boardroom, high above a city that looks like a circuitboard, looms the physical version of the Master Control Program, a sleek black tabletop (has anyone built a PC case like this yet?). "Do you know how many outside systems I've appropriated?" it brags, and yet Dillinger looks nervous, sallow. Who's in charge, the operating system or the tycoon? This question is resolved in the computer world, where Dillinger becomes Sark, a warrior-general forced to do the bidding of the evil OS. "End of line," it says, after each chilling command.

Besides being ahead of its time, Tron is beautiful and breathtaking. It is also murky, stupefying and full of plot holes. There is acting that belongs on "Mystery Science Theater 3000." Characters say things like, "I don't want to bust out of this dump and find nuthin' but a lot of cold circuits waiting for me." When a computer programmer (Cindy Morgan) in the real world says of her ex, "Flynn had Group 7 access," her jealous boyfriend (Boxleitner in a dual role as a wooden software engineer) shoots back, "He had access to you!"

But characterization and romance aren't the point, any more than they are a movie like Metropolis or a Soviet propaganda film about oppressed wheat farmers. Now that the movie is on DVD, those who aren't in the mood for stilted B-movie fun (mostly in the real-world scenes) are free to skip around and admire the alternate universe created here.

Wendy Carlos's widely-bootlegged and recently re-released score is the perfect counterpart to the heartbreakingly well-realized sights of the computer wonderland.

No movie has used computer graphics as imaginatively as Tron. Instead of trying to capture reality, it's inspired by the strange new universes of such arcade games as "Space Invaders" and "Battlezone." This is a world with places like the Sea of Simulation, and golden, surrealist vehicles called Light Cycles. And take a look at the scene when Bridges is digitized — ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk, finger by finger, piece by piece before we follow his trip into the eye of a laser beam and into a valley of drifting electronic fragments. "The Matrix" wishes it were "Tron."

The rebels of Tron salute each other with "Greetings, program." It should have been the catch phrase of the summer of 1982, but lost out to "E.T., phone home" and "Khaaaan!" Yet it deserves to be the battle cry of the '00s, as users fight to free computers from the conformity that set in last decade. Maybe the upcoming sequel, "Tron 2.0: Killer App" will bring it back. The time is right for a movie with an operating system as a villain. A lot of people feel it's time to free your hard drive from that Master Control Program.

— John Gorenfeld (john@flakmag.com)