Friday Night Is Movie Night
It occurred to me that some regular features wouldn’t be a bad idea again, so without further ado let me introduce my special movie night – in which I take the trailer of a movie about computer games and, with no preconceptions, analyse it for your entertainment and delectation.
This week, we start off with the grandaddy of them all… TRON.
00:12 – Horrible realisation immediately strikes that the ENCOM 511 is probably about as powerful as a Playstation. OMG KILLER IN THE HOME! Actually this is the most cod realisation it’s possible to make when doing something like this, so I’d better get it out of the way now. Besides, assumptions like that do nothing but get in the way of the enjoyment of a film like this – a better assumption would be that the computer is magic and can do anything. That’s the kind of thinking that movie writers were still expecting from us by the time Swordfish rolled around and people in films started hacking gas pipes and individual molecules of fire and anything else they felt like.
00:21 – Is Master Control an organisation, or a person? It’d be the coolest supervillain name ever. He’d be all in black leather, like a BDSM Darth Vader. (Hi, everyone who found this post by typing ‘BDSM Darth Vader’ into Google!)
00:30 – “the ultimate tool” – ooer missus etc
00:38 – “Space Paranoids” – as I remember, ‘paranoid’ was a big buzzword of the seventies and I assume the early eighties as well, as the tail end of the druggie era meshed with a new rise in therapy as a replacement for religion – a cure-all for all problems, with the uncured, swarming with neuroses, as a minor cultural bogeyman. Swapping ‘Space Invaders’ for ‘Space Paranoids’ seems like the kind of thing that would be funnier at the time than it is now, but it still retains a trace of black humour.
00:46 – Holy goodnight! That’s the most crazed hacker ever! Wait, though, is he talking about hacking into a bunch of Space Invaders machines? That’s what it sounds like – like he’s going to hack into all the Space Invaders machines at the arcade for the ‘evidence’. Choke – maybe it’s drugs!
00:59 – “Kevin Flynn, computer genius.” – Hackers, take note. Instead of spending two minutes yapping on about how Angelina Jolie listens to young people’s music before jumping over a giant can of Mountain Dew on a snowboard and high-fiving someone for being most excellent, or however you tried to show us computers were cool, why not just have an easy-going man sitting down and greeting a deadly artificial intelligence with a relaxed “Heyyyy…” (I still maintain that this is the Master Control Program for all Space Invaders. Evidently all the arcade machines are hooked up to one big A.I. that guides the ships around.)
01:10 – OMG! This raises questions of whether Kevin died horribly as he was laser-disintegrated, and whether what’s running around the computer reality is just a copy of his mind. Either way, you’re going to need a lot more than a Playstation to manage that. I stand corrected.
01:29 – OMG CYBERSEX
01:35 – “Where LOVE – and ESCAPE – do NOT compute!” – Dear God, Mr Voiceover Man. Dear God. (On an unrelated note, I’m impressed by the ‘graphics’ here – I imagine that at this point in movie history about 1% of them were actual computer graphics, if that, but they do a great job of creating a ‘computer world’.)
01:53 – Hey! It’s Snake! Only it’s multiplayer, on the internet, with bikes, but it’s the evil internet and if you die YOU DIE FOR REAL NOES. The trailer is evidently doing its job in that I’m getting what the film is about, rather than a mish-mash of nothing. (I can’t pretend to be totally without preconceptions here – I never have seen Tron the movie, but I’ve played Tron the game, so I know what a lightcycle is and how the gameplay differs from Snake. But the first time I played Tron I did think ‘Oh, it’s Snake but versus an evil Snake’.)
02:15 – Nifty zoom out there. Is it the CITY – or is it merely a CIRCUIT BOARD!?!???? Or – IS IT BOTH!!! Again, Hackers tried this but it was less cool.
So, judging by this trailer, the plot of the film TRON is:
There’s an evil computer in a room somewhere that controls all the Space Invaders. Kevin Flynn is searching for ‘evidence’, maybe evidence of Space Invaders cheating the players out of quarters but more likely the search for an ultimate truth. The evil computer doesn’t like this and disintegrates/digitises him so it can toy with him as part of the game, along with a saucy female prisoner or possibly program. I’ll go with program, because that gives us a spicy man/machine love subplot. Kevin Flynn eventually either escapes back to the real world (yawn) or (much more interesting) overthrows the evil computer and ends the war between the Space Invaders and humans, leading to GAME OVER for mankind as the violence against the video enemy ceases forever and Flynn and his pixel bride can live in peace.
How did I do?
