Tron (1982)

  Movies have come a long way since 1982.  Holy shit.  Christy and I watched the original Tron the other night.  She hated it but she's not really into sci-fi or techno-geekery.  I could enjoy the idea behind it, even as I cringed at the execution.

Disgraced employee Flynn (Jeff Bridges) keeps hacking into his old employer ENCOM looking for proof that his boss, Dillinger (David Warner), has stolen Flynn's ideas for the last five popular video games the company produced.  He enlists his old co-worker Allen (Bruce Boxleitner) and his ex-girlfriend Lora (Cindy Morgan) who is now dating Allen, to help him break in to ENCOM to find the evidence.  What they don't know is that ENCOM's Master Control Program is actually self-aware and kind of a dick.  MCP shoots Flynn with a laser and sucks him into the computer system.  (Because that's what lasers do.)  Once on the Grid, Flynn has to partner with security program Tron (Bruce Boxleitner) in order to survive gladiatorial-style games long enough to reach an input-output tower to notify Allen of....something?

Frankly, the movie kind of lost me at that point because I was busy with my melting retinas.  The computer world is insanely bright and colored mostly with neon.  I thought I would be prepared for it after seeing TRON:  Legacy but the low-quality added an extra layer of harshness. 

This was a huge flop when it was first released but, thanks to a patina of nostalgia, it's made somewhat of a resurgence.  Blu-ray is a tremendous help to it, removing any muddiness or fuzziness from the graphics, allowing you to see Steve Jobs' fever dream in all its cyan and magenta glory.