Tron

I was dubious when I popped the DVD into the Blu-ray, wondering what this would look like almost forty years later. I recall that I, like most people, was pretty impressed by the computer graphics. Tron was the first film to use much CGI, though only about twenty minutes of it. CGI was ridiculously slow and expensive, considering that the “super-computer” they used, something called a PDP-10, had a mind-boggling 2MB (that’s MEGA-bytes) of memory and 330MB of storage. So, what would it all look like in 2020, when CGI is still pretty damn expensive and labor-intensive, but indistinguishable from reality, when that is desired, or capable of creating absolutely anything, should that be your goal?

It looked a lot better than I expected, actually. I’m sure kids today would laugh at it and be bored to tears, but for a pioneering effort it held up fine. Of course, this is coming from a guy who really appreciates black and white silent movies shot at 16FPS, with title cards for dialog, so factor that in. The acting is okay, but I have to say the plot is not much to shout about. But neither is the plot of Super Mario Brothers, is it?