1982: TRON

What’s it about?

After being bilked out of some lucrative intellectual property by a corporate bigwig, programmer Jeff Bridges sneaks back into his old office to find evidence of the theft. But while hacking the mainframe in search of proof, the Master Control Program -- an all-knowing sentient program that runs the company’s entire computer system (and then some) -- uses an experimental ray gun to trap Bridges inside the computer system itself.

Once inside, Bridges finds himself in a weird dystopian world patrolled by the Master Control Program’s jackbooted goons. But rather than put Bridges to death outright, he is instead forced to compete in a series of gladiatorial games against the personifications of renegade programs who refuse to renounce their belief in “the users” or submit to the Master Control Program. After escaping from one such game, Bridges sets out with a couple of free-thinking programs (including a digital warrior named Tron who was written specifically for the task) to take down the Master Control Program.

Is it any good?

Somehow I’ve never seen TRON before, so I knew from the start of this project that I’d certainly have to watch it. I’m not sure if it exactly counts as a classic, but if you tell folks that you’ve spent two years watching practically every science fiction movie worth seeing, then they’re going to expect that you’ve seen TRON. (Note: This blog will likely take me two years to finish, but one thing I’ve learned in the process is that it would take far longer than two years for me to watch every science fiction movie worth seeing.)

I’m not even sure what exactly I thought TRON was about before I saw it. I really ought to have written a little summary of my expectations before hand, but the truth is that I didn’t really think too much about what I’d be getting myself into. I knew it starred Jeff Bridges, and I knew it took place inside a computer, and I knew it involved something called “light cycles”. (I only knew this last fact because, many years ago, I used to spend hours playing an addictive freeware game called Tron Light Cycles against my brothers.)

I’ve spent many of this blog’s entries arguing why such-and-such fantasy movie really ought to be considered science fiction at heart. (Look no further than last week’s DARK CRYSTAL entry for an example.) So it’s with some hesitation that I find myself about to say that TRON is really a fantasy movie at heart. It’s not just that the insides of the computer as imagined by TRON bear no resemblance to the actual workings of a computer. But the explanation for computers that the movie comes up with is so primitive and so benighted that it boggles my mind. Let me try to explain what I mean.

When faced with the need to explain what goes on inside computers, the movie TRON tells us that there are little people inside that make them work. Again, a second time -- according to TRON, there are thousands of little people inside your computer right now, without whom the computer would no longer function. There’s a little man who runs your word processor, and a little man who runs your spreadsheet, and a little man who runs your solitaire game. This is the same explanation that ignorant and unsophisticated peoples came up with when they were confronted with inexplicable natural forces. There’s a big man who makes the lightning, a big man who makes the tides, and a big man who makes the west wind. That was all very well and good before the scientific method was invented, but we’ve moved considerably past that point by now. If THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) is a fantasy because it relies on Zeus and Hera and the rest of the gods to explain the workings of the natural world, then TRON is just as much a fantasy because it relies on little men to explain the workings of a calculating engine.

I understand that the world of TRON is meant to represent the virtual world of digital space -- that is, that the little men of the movie are not meant to be literally living inside the physical space of the computer. Instead, they are supposed to live in the computer’s memory, and everything we see is a fanciful representation of what’s going on in the memory. I get that. The problem is that this explanation doesn’t really make any logical sense either. Why would the virtual representation of a computer program have visible circuitry on its bodysuit? Why would they need to travel from point to point as if they were traversing physical space (something that happens in this movie A LOT)? What happens to the functions that the programs were supposed to control when they are terminated? Why is there a separate program that controls the input/output functions of all other programs? And so on.

I don’t really want to get into every nuance of how TRON blows my mind with its illogic and incuriosity about the details of computer science. Suffice to say that the world itself only intermittently makes sense if you take it as a representation of actual technology. I could be way off base here (and please let me know if I am), but the world of TRON is a fantasy world dressed up in a circuit-spangled bodysuit.

I haven’t forgotten that when I was writing about STAR WARS (1977), I spent a lot of time arguing that fantasies can still be called science fiction so long as they look like science fiction. In the case of STAR WARS, this means that the robots and spaceships qualify it for sci-fi status, even though the mystical forces at work and the importance of “destiny” and the general lack of interest in actual science are strong marks against it. But robots and spaceships have been common features of science fiction movies since the early 1900s. George Lucas clearly wanted STAR WARS to look like a sci-fi flick, no matter what else was going on in the story and themes, and so he used easily recognizable visual shorthand. It’s sort of like how you only really need Monument Valley, a ten-gallon hat, and a hoss to make a western. It doesn’t matter what the story is about -- if you put it in the right setting with the right costumes and props, it’s going to look like a western even if it violates every traditional theme of the genre. (Exhibit A for the defense: there are actually a handful of “Soviet westerns”.)

But I’m not sure if bodysuits painted with glowing circuitry are any kind of recognizable visual shorthand for science fiction. It’s certainly shorthand for “computer stuff”, but is dressing magical computer men in circuit-inspired outfits really any different than giving Bacchus a crown of grape leaves and a double chin? TRON doesn’t want to look like a science fiction movie necessarily -- it just wants to look like a fantasy computer world.

I obviously don’t think that the makers of TRON really believe that computers are really run by little men inside them. But I also don’t think that the ancient Greeks honestly believed that the sun was a chariot driven across the sky. Myths were partly a way of “explaining” things that couldn’t really be fathomed by ancient people, but the stories were really ways of passing on shared ideals and culture. That’s why many myths are still affecting today, even in a post-Enlightenment world when we should all know better. The fact that a myth may have involved, say, Poseidon and Vulcan didn’t necessarily mean that it was supposed to be regarded as proto-scientific commentary on the ocean and volcanoes. Likewise, I don’t see the computery setting of TRON as suggesting that it has any kind of commentary on computers or computer science. It is concerned with intellectual property rights, which is pretty prescient, but there's nothing about the world inside the computer that makes it fundamentally different from the real world. The program world has jobs, religious faiths, government, military -- but these things aren't set up in any particularly computery way. They are just translations of human institutions into a computer setting.

Anyway, I’ve done much more complaining about TRON than I expected I would. I enjoyed it okay, though the story is really just a run-of-the-mill dystopian pastiche. It definitely had its moments -- the gladiatorial bits were probably my favorites, and I was impressed that some of the games that Jeff Bridges was forced to play actually look like they could be fun computer games. (In the case of the light cycles, I can attest that this is definitely true.) The special effects are neat, but the world they depict has no logical underpinnings. So everything feels flat and empty. And this is no FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) where the characters go from lungs to heart to brain -- that is, to recognizable places that the audience might want to see. The only interesting "places" in TRON's computer world are an input/output tower and the nexus of the Master Control Program. But I don't know what an input/output tower is. Is it a program function? A piece of hardware? What keeps FANTASTIC VOYAGE interesting is that each destination depicts a real organ, and the nature of each results in distinct dangers and opportunities. In TRON, it all largely feels the same.

But look -- I’d be a hypocrite if I seriously asked you all to agree with me that TRON is a fantasy movie. It takes in place inside of a computer, and a computer is a science thing, so it’s science fiction -- no matter how else I might feel about it.

1966: FANTASTIC VOYAGE

What’s it about?

When an assassination attempt sends a Russian defector with important defense secrets into a coma, the American government decides to shrink a team of surgeons down to microbial size so they can repair the damage from the inside. The plan calls for injecting a submarine carrying five-person team (including Donald Pleasance and Raquel Welch) into the carotid artery for a relatively short jaunt to the affected area of the brain.

Things, however, immediately go wrong when the submarine is swept down a whirlpool of blood into the venous system and starts heading towards the heart. Still hoping to complete their mission, the team must now traverse the perils of the heart, the lungs, the lymphatic system, and the inner ear before arriving at the brain. And the probable presence of a saboteur on board only adds to the danger.




Is it any good?

There’s a part of me that wants to hail FANTASTIC VOYAGE as something like a culmination of the ambitions of sci-fi movies from the previous two decades. I don’t think the case for that kind of claim is foolproof -- there’s another part of me, after all, that recognizes it is a movie with a lot of flaws. But even though FANTASTIC VOYAGE is perhaps not exactly pioneering, it does feel to me like a big incremental step forward for the genre.

It would be nice if I could point to some particular element as the obvious keystone to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there really is one. Instead, I think the difference with FANTASTIC VOYAGE is really more about the shortcomings of the movies that came before it. Take DESTINATION MOON (1950), for instance. That movie stood out at the time because it combined a dramatic speculative vision with the budget needed to achieve it and a willingness to take the material seriously. But the science and special effects upstaged the plot and characters, and the story itself is just never satisfying. THE SILENT STAR (1960), by contrast, had the vision and spectacle, the willingness to treat sci-fi seriously, and a pretty good story -- but it lacked the budget and talent to really bring them to life. Again and again, most sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 1960s seem to fall short in one category or another. ON THE BEACH (1959) lacks a clear or compelling vision, THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955) and VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961) don’t take their science or their audiences seriously, and a whole host of movies fall prey to low budgets, short production times, or inexperienced cast and crew.




One part of my argument is that FANTASTIC VOYAGE succeeds (more or less) on every meaningful metric that I would use to rate a sci-fi movie. It has an compelling speculative vision that is really pretty unique. It has the budget to convincingly create a weird and alien world full of imaginative spectacle. It has an exciting story and a talented cast that makes it believable enough. And it has a real interest in science, a respect for accuracy, and a curiosity about what might exist beyond the bounds of the knowable world.

If I took half an hour to think about it, I could probably come up with a short list of six or seven sci-fi movies from 1966 and earlier that arguably meet all of those criteria just as well as FANTASTIC VOYAGE does. But I think the difference with FANTASTIC VOYAGE is that it succeeds while swinging for the fences -- it envisions a story on an epic scale, and mostly delivers what it promises without losing sight of the elements that make a good movie. This isn’t a black and white B-movie set mostly in an ordinary American town with a slow-building sci-fi premise. It’s an all out full color adventure that takes place largely in a world that none of us will ever see except on TV and movie screens. In saying this, I mean no disrespect to those quieter, less flashy movies like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) or I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958). The fact they are a less ambitious doesn’t make them any less enjoyable -- just less likely to create as big of a splash.




I also don’t want anybody to get the idea that I think FANTASTIC VOYAGE is a perfect movie. It’s got its share of flaws as well. The weakest link is probably the story, which exists entirely as a mechanism for first getting the surgical team from one bodily attraction to another. Even accepting that surgery via miniaturized submarine is the best option for this particular patient, there’s no reason that the operation in question should take the team through the heart, the lungs, and most of the other stops they make. So the story is mostly just a string of accidents that each justify the next stop on the journey. Yet, it’s all believable enough and certainly makes for a more exciting trip than there might otherwise have been.

I don’t want to spend too much time picking nits though. The acting is good, the submarine is neat, and the special effects are pretty effective. I had thought that at least some of the special effects were the result of miniature photography of real cells. But that’s not the case -- every special effect (from red blood cells to the chambers of the heart to alveoli to antibodies) are recreated at a giant size so they can be photographed with the models and actors. The fantastic voyage does eventually start to feel a bit like “the greatest hits of health class”, but even so there’s something undeniably interesting about a (seemingly fairly accurate) journey through the human body. And as far as cinematic images go, the sight of Donald Pleasance being eaten by a white corpuscle is one that sticks with you for decades.



What else happened this year?

-- John Frankenheimer directed SECONDS, in which an old man is given a chance for rejuvenation in the body of a relatively young (but still incredibly square) Rock Hudson. But when it turns out that he has just as little control over his new life as his old one, he starts trying to break out.
-- Francois Truffaut’s directed a surprisingly good adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451. The movie improves a bit on the novel as far as pacing and character interest goes, but it’s probably still all too allegorical for its own good. Julie Christie co-stars in Truffaut’s only English-language movie.
-- A man gets an experimental lifelike mask to cover up his disfigured face in THE FACE OF ANOTHER. But when he uses his new identity to anonymously seduce his own wife, the experiment starts to go awry.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1966...

I was all ready to recommend FAHRENHEIT 451, but I think after writing this entry I talked myself into going with FANTASTIC VOYAGE as the best movie of the year. As I said earlier, it’s a big incremental jump for the genre -- and it seems like an important stepping stone on the way to some of the true classics that arrived a couple years later.