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49 'Light cycles' from Steven Lisberger's 1982 film Tron .
in order to escape. In conventional terms Tro n was not a great
success, critically or in terms of box-office returns, and neither the
plot nor the acting are of high standard, but in other terms and
particularly in retrospect it is of great interest. It represents the first
concerted effort to use three-dimensional computer graphics exten-
sively in a film. It also is the first film to attempt to imagine visually
a computer-generated environment, and as such is clearly prefigures
ideas about cyberspace. Arguably the limitations of computer graph-
ics at the time make the virtual landscape more compelling and
convincing than what could be produced now. The stylized, angular
scenes with no pretence towards photorealism are more plausible
as a representation of a computer's imaginary interior, than, say, the
more visually complex VR scenography of a later film such as The
Lawnmower Man (
). But perhaps the most interesting aspect
of the film is that, for most of its duration, the action takes place in
the computer. Tro n looks forward to films such as The Matrix (
1996
),
in which the world is nothing but a computer simulation. Clearly
this, like the conspiracy movies of the '
1999
s, can be read as a kind
of allegory of a culture in which technologies of control and specta-
cle are all pervasive. In the genre of Cyberpunk, which emerged
almost simultaneously with Tro n 's release, this connection is made
far more explicit.
Also of interest was the idea of the hacker as hero. The Jeff Bridges
character in Tro n , Kevin Flynn, is a hip, anti-authoritarian computer
70
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