Oh, I love that Tron review! Both for its charming naïveté of the time and its enthusiasm for the film, as well as the recognition and embracing of it as a giant step forward in the evolution of cinema and production techniques.
In the time since, it became sadly cool to knock Tron a bit for a while, because it was so new and different that audiences didn’t know how to respond and its major crime was that it wasn’t another Star Wars, so it got forgotten just how groundshaking, influential and impactful It was generally.
Even if it didn’t lead to an immediate transformation and industry swamping of CG effects like T2, Jurassic, Gump and Toy Story would only a decade later, it remains the film that *invented* those techniques, or at least created the tools with which to produce them, and inspired the talents behind those films to either break into the business or develop their craft.
Tron doesn’t get enough serious credit for dong what it did literally ahead of its time, and I was too young to really read reviews and pick up on what they were saying and just enjoyed films — and this one especially — merely based on the merits of seeing and responding to them, so it’s really nice to find at least one review that presciently could see just what this was and where things were going.
This is all kind of picked up in The Guardian piece, which is also great but obviously benefits from that 40-year hindsight. You do get a semi-feeling of how cool Tron was back in '82, though, for those that got it, how it changed film, and how exciting the future of it all seemed afterwards…
End of line.
