In Defense of Bad Movies

Let's get one thing out of the way right off. The original Disney film Tron (1982) was in many ways an awful movie. The stilted love triangle between Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), Lora (Cindy Morgan), and Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) is nearly unwatchable. The electronic world that the film depicts, while visually stunning thanks more to the design work of Jean Giraud and Syd Mead than to any specialized production techniques, is hard to follow and internally inconsistent¹. The Wendy Carlos score has its moments, but mostly it reflects the thinking of the late '70s and early '80s that noodling on a synthesizer was all it took to make a movie sound futuristic². Then there's that Journey single that we hear during the sequence at Flynn's Arcade, so cheesy that even by Journey's standards it wasn't good enough to go on one of their albums, all because Supertramp—fucking Supertramp—pulled out at the last minute. You can't even really make the case that despite all these shortcomings the movie was somehow groundbreaking. There's relatively little computer animation in the movie and all of it was created not by Disney's animation department, not by director Steven Lisberger's own small team of animators, but by four animation studios that were already in the business of using early CGI for ad agency work. The only difference is that rather than extreme closeups of a twin-bladed razor shaving off a single whisker or the anatomy of a steel-belted radial, the four studios were using CGI to depict video game tanks and light cycles.

None of these criticisms mattered to the fans. It's hard to describe to anyone born after 1980, but in the late '70s and early 80s computers were, to most of us, unfathomably esoteric—and a bit scary. The people in the industry, with their impenetrable jargon of bytes and software and random access memory, seemed to the rest of us to be equally esoteric. Through their artistry and their vision, Giraud and Mead created a world that we wanted to explore, where we wanted to have our own adventures. Jeff Bridges, through his acting craft, brought to life a character who had depth and humor and approachability. An entire generation of young people in 1982 saw Bridges's performance and thought to themselves if someone like Flynn can do that, maybe I can too, and were inspired to pursue careers in IT and software, going on to build if not the foundation, then maybe the first floor or two, of the Information Age.

Over the next quarter of a century, the fans wondered and traded rumors of a successor to the original film. The fans in the age cohort that the the original was marketed toward³ were joined by new generations of fans who saw the movie on video. In 2002, Disney released a 20th anniversary DVD, chock-a-block with bonus features that included a tease for a Tron-based video game and a long-form making-of documentary that strongly hinted at the possibility of a sequel. In 2008, Disney showed a trailer at Comic-Con for a potential Tron sequel that featured a modernized light cycle sequence. Audience response was raucous, raucous enough that Disney green-lighted the project and Tron: Legacy was released in 2010. Criticism of the new Tron installment was immediate, predictable given the legacy (pun intended) of the first movie, and at least a little mean-spirited. The story lacked consistency and was hard to follow, the acting was stiff, and the Daft Punk score sounded tired and cliché. And because CGI techniques in filmmaking had become pretty much standard, any free pass that the first Tron might have gotten for being innovative (whether it actually was or not) was no longer applicable. Once again, none of this mattered to the fans, or at least most of the fans. Tron: Legacy was a moneymaker, if not as big a moneymaker as Disney might have hoped.

Tron: Legacy contains at least one hint that director Joseph Kosinski might have anticipated all the negativity, and decided to play a little joke in advance on the film's detractors. Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), son of protagonist Kevin Flynn from the original movie, returns to Flynn's Arcade. The arcade is dark, dusty, and cobwebbed. All of the console arcade games have plastic dust covers. The younger Flynn finds the electrical panel and starts flipping circuit breakers one at a time⁴. With each click, banks of lights begin to shine and video games, long dormant, come to life. Music starts playing—from a jukebox?, from a Muzak-like system?, it doesn't matter—and the song is Journey's "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" from the album Frontiers, a song that is universally considered—even by those who like the band—to be Journey's worst song ever.

In October of 2025, Disney released Tron: Ares, the third feature film in the series. At this point, the negative reviews and reactions pretty much write themselves⁵. The story is inaccessible and pointless. Jared Leto's performance lacks depth⁶. In an NPR review, Bob Mondello calls the film a "waste of pixels". In what can only be seen as an intentional display of ignorance of how the Tron color palette works that is intended to show his disdain, Mondello describes the latest light cycle sequence and quips, "Tron's bikes were multicolored in 1982, Tron Legacy's bikes were yellow in 2010. Tron: Ares' bikes are red. That's progress for you."

Once again, none of this matters to the fans, at least not to this fan. Eve Kim (Greta Lee), the likely successor to Kevin Flynn if the franchise continues⁷, has a poignant back story of loss and carrying on. Ares (Jared Leto) slowly discovers his capacity for empathy. The film is far from perfect, but it's visually dazzling, emotionally engaging, profoundly nostalgic (especially for those of us who remember the '80s), and spiked with a few moments of genuine humor.

People watch movies for any number of reasons, not the least of which is escapism. The motion picture as an art form came into its own in the 1930s, when a couple hours inside a movie theater proved to be a relatively inexpensive distraction from the worries of the Great Depression. Some of the movies to come from that era were brilliant, most weren't, but they all, with varying degrees of success, put something into the lives of audience members that wasn't otherwise there. Eighty years later, the same principle applies: a movie can have flaws and shortcomings and still be enjoyable. The value of escapism shouldn't be lost on anyone in our time. Over the last couple decades, we've done a really good job of building a world that's worth escaping from periodically. If you're a fan—or you're curious about what all the fuss is about—Tron: Ares can allow a couple hours to immerse yourself in an experience unlike the everyday. There's no need to let the cynics and detractors spoil all our fun.

End of line.

1. Perhaps the best, but far from only example is when we see a character animation sequence of about three seconds' duration of spider-like electronic creatures while Yori (Cindy Morgan) warns, "This isn't gonna be easy. If those grid bugs get us, we've had it." After the brief scene, the grid bugs are never seen again, and no further exposition is given about the grid bugs' origin or the consequences of having a run-in with one. 

2. See also: Logan's Run.

3. I was 14 when Tron was released in 1982. Although I didn't see it in a theater, I was intrigued by the trailers and the making-of featurettes that aired on local television, and saw it not long after it was released to video.

4. Apparently someone was still paying the electric bill for the abandoned arcade. Sure, I'm willing to suspend disbelief.

5. Interestingly, there hasn't been much negativity about the Nine Inch Nails score. Everyone has to draw the line somewhere, and apparently taking cheap shots at Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is a bridge too far.

6. Leto's character is a computer program who is experiencing the real world for the first time. Of course Leto is going to play it a little stiff because the character is stiff. What's everyone expecting, Mike Myers's "Oscar Clip" from Wayne's World?

7. Jeff Bridges briefly reprises his role in Tron: Ares in a way that subtly suggests he might be done after this one.