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  TronBy Daniel JohnsonNovember 8, 2007 The neon vistas of Tron's slick-surfaced dystopia have aged better than you'd think. Though generally remembered as a laughable, overly-enthusiastic celebration of '80s video game fashion, its art direction and cinematography were so lovingly conceived that they've rendered the film timeless. Every shot of its dazzling, glowstick aesthetic is an exercise in composition. As style tsar, French comic book artist Moebius established a uniquely beautiful style for Tron that was half Yellow Submarine, half Lamborghini blueprint. Tron was never about the story. Yeah, the viral fascism of its arch villain, the Master Control Program, was probably some kind of broad statement on the stifling woes of the Regan era, and there are even muddled attempts to address the relationship between man and his "Creator." But really, the film was Disney's pickax for chipping away at the fanaticism and licensing goldmine of Star Wars. Tron mirrored George Lucas's swashbuckling saga, but with a geeky twist. It had its own trio of misfits - a mop-top blonde do-gooder, the dark-haired renegade who begrudgingly joins his quest, and the cute female tease who kind of wants them both - and they're sucked into the circuit-sized inner workings of the computer world to do battle with an advancing evil (once again with a British accent) in the form of a power-hungry AI program. About the only thing they didn't do was end up in a trash compactor. The irony is that, though Tron borrowed liberally (and occasionally outright stole) from the first Star Wars trilogy, by placing its actors in front of empty green-screen-type canvases to have their FX environments dropped in after the fact, it actually prefigured the next installment of Lucas's series - the diarrhea-esque prequels - as well as generally opened up the floodgates to the atrocities of CGI abuse. Sadly, the Motion Picture Academy denied Tron a much-deserved special-effects award nomination, saying its creators cheated by using computers, even though a small percentage of the film's scenes were actually created with computers. Most were actually painted on in an old-school analog technique that was so primitive, tiring and costly, it was never used again. And that's a historical travesty because, 25 years later, Tron is still a visual turn-on. (Try muting the sound and playing it at your next party, or the local hipster sushi bar.) Long before Steve Jobs made the clean interface the holy aesthetic of our time, Tron gave computers their own visual poetry and, considering we're more wired-in than ever, it still has something to say to us.
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