End of Line: My Love/Hate Relationship with Tron

I have a really strange relationship with Tron. I've always been quite fascinated with Disney's 1982 video-game action-adventure -- owning three different home-video versions of the film, keeping some of the original toys, concluding letters to my grandparents with the phrase "END OF LINE" and, for the better part of the last three years, wallpapering my iPhone screen with its movie poster... All of which I guess is only interesting insofar as it's such an awful movie. With the release of Tron: Legacy this weekend, however, revisionist historians are having an Internet field day with their outpourings of love for the original film. Where have these people been the last 28 years?

I don't mind Steven Lisberger's film getting some better-late-than-never attention, and I have no problem with anyone admiring Lisberger's work for what it could have been -- or rather what he and Disney wanted it to be. But come on. The movie is beyond boring. Not that it started out that way for me: The first time I saw a commercial for the original Tron was, I'm pretty sure, during an episode of The Greatest American Hero (or, possibly, something called Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters which I was forced to watch by my Mandrell Sisters-loving father). I was immediately hooked: Look at these people, whoever they are, they glow! You must understand how interesting glowing people are to a 7-year-old boy; I mean, I watched 12 hours of a show starring Desi Arnaz Jr. called Automan simply because Arnaz fought crime with a character who glowed from the neck down. Keep in mind, too, that this was 1982. It had been two years (an eternity to me at the time) since the last Star Wars movie, and I was running out of adventures for my current set of action figures. There are only so many times that Luke Skywalker can team up with Boba Fett to defeat the unlikely evil duo of Lobot and Walrus Man. But here was Tron! They had Lightcycles and glowing characters! Tron was to be my destiny.

For weeks, all I could talk about was the mighty Tron, whoever that was. I counted the days until I could finally see this film that would surely change my life, and on the afternoon of Saturday, July 10, 1982, my parents took me to our local Wehrenberg theater in suburban St. Louis to finally see Tron. About 35 minutes in I fell asleep.

I mean, really: Nothing happens in this film. Jeff Bridges, as Flynn, gets sucked into a computer (one impression that Tron did leave on me: I never quite trusted that Commodore 64 again) and, as a result, he must get "over there." You see, Flynn is "over here," but to get home, he must go "there." And there's your plot for Tron. Anyone who tells you differently is lying. The cool Lightcycles? They were in the film for about 10 minutes. The ending of the film -- a freeze frame on the top on the Encom building with the three principals -- made it feel like I was watching an episode of Magnum P.I. Even the toys were awful. Seriously, look at these things. What was I supposed to do with those? They look like Jell-O molds.

Also, at that age, I couldn't grasp the fact that Tron, the title character, wasn't the main character. Sure, Tron (played by Bruce Boxleitner) was a part of the film, but to me it would have been like if Raiders of the Lost Ark had been titled Sallah. I became so anti-Tron in late 1982 that my mom had to drag me kicking and screaming to a showing of Kiss Me Goodbye (a story about a ghost named Jolly, played by James Caan, who visits his widow, played by Sally Field), which happened to star that terrible, boring Jeff Bridges guy from Tron. I did not fall asleep during Kiss Me Goodbye. Conversely, in late 1982, I would religiously watch Boxleitner play a character named Frank Buck in a short-lived television show called Bring 'Em Back Alive -- a show that also starred Cindy Morgan, who happened to be the female lead in Tron. I never made the connection that either of these two actors appeared in the bane of my young, cinemagoing existence.

Yet here's what I can't fully explain: The longer I went without seeing Tron, the more I liked it. It was almost a formula, one that resembled: "Lightcycles equal cool. Tron has lightcycles. Ergo, Tron must be cool." By fourth grade, I would be known to leave a movie such as The Last Starfighter and declare, just to piss off my friend, "Yeah that was good... but it wasn't as good as Tron." Honestly, I didn't really know anyone at the time who had seen Tron (not many people did; the film only made $33 million, which was OK at the time, finishing second in its first week to the fifth week of E.T.), so I could stand at the top of my own little sci-fi mountain and declare: No, your opinion doesn't matter unless you've seen Tron. (Related: This is why people become Internet movie writers: so we can Tweet about how great a film is that we saw early, then forget about it the second it's shown to the masses.)

But at the time I really believed what I was saying. Yes, I remembered that I fell asleep, but that was surely because I was so much younger and there was no way that my brain could have possibly understood the greatness that must have been unspooling in front of me. The concept of a movie about users and programs was so ahead of its time -- and it was -- there was no way I could have appreciated it in 1982. It was the mid-1990s before I actually saw Tron again. I just knew that this time I would fully appreciate what the movie was trying to say.

Nope, still terrible. In fact, it was a little worse because the glowing people didn't have the same effect on me as they did in the early '80s. Still, again, by the mid 2000s, Tron was restored as a great film in my mind. This ended for good (I hope) about six months ago when I made the mistake of watching it again. This time it just pissed me off because, although aesthetically pleasing, I felt so much more aware of how close Lisberger and Co. were to making something truly innovative and great.

But something strange happened between my second and third viewings. In 2008 a teaser trailer for a Tron sequel -- inexplicably titled TR2N -- premiered at Comic-Con (a trailer, incidentally, that has no actual scenes from what would become Tron: Legacy). All of the sudden, everyone was a Tron fan; the consensus grew that the original was pure genius. My perpetrated fraud was becoming reality. And today, only two days from Tron: Legacy opening in theaters, all people want to talk about are the merits of the original film. Where were these people when I was in fourth grade? (OK, probably still in someone's womb.)

None of this is to say a person can't genuinely like Tron. But this new, overwhelming wave of passion doesn't really add up. It almost feels like people are going purposely overboard with their love for the first film to make up for their earlier dereliction -- catching up with some sort of predetermined critical notion of Tron that states, "Yes, this is a great film, and if you don't like it you lose your street cred." But Tron is not Blade Runner: a visionary work of style, storytelling and character that will cost you your street cred if you can't make a convincing case for any opposition you might have. It's time to make the distinction and move on as moviegoers.

In any event, I've been down this same long, winding Tron road, and I know where it goes. Tron was my one chance to be a contrarian -- to defend a film that's really not worth defending. Now that everyone seems to defend Tron, I admit I've lost my niche. When I see these fans' glowing (no pun intended) Tron tweets, I can't help but think, I know what you're doing! That used to be my sh*tty movie!. I just hope people who watch Tron for the first time watch it for what it is: A fairly groundbreaking film, visually, but light on anything resembling entertainment or plot. Even Disney realizes the original is a snore fest: Plans to re-release Tron ahead of Tron: Legacy were summarily, quietly scrapped.

I've since thought about trying to adopt something else as my new offbeat niche movie, even going so far as to replace my iPhone wallpaper with art from The Last Starfighter. Alas, it's just not taking. I think my argument could be good, too. It just wouldn't be as good as Tron.

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