I hadn't watched either since I was a weeeeeee little children, and seeing them as an adult is... well... eye-opening.
Tron, it turns out, is simply abysmal. It applies the formula. Start with three things: something cool, something new that is equally cool but a little frightening and cripplingly difficult for a layman to understand, and something truly frightening. In the mid 80's, those blanks were most easily filled with the following: video games, computers, and communism. Take a lovable scamp who is really good at the "cool" thing, put him in a world of "new" things and pit him (using his "cool" skills) against a bad guy who subtly (or not) takes on all the characteristics of the "frightening" thing. It works. Seriously, plug in "computers", "virtual reality", and "militarism" a few years later you get The Lawnmower Man. I digress.
In Tron, a video game mogul/computer genius decides to break into his old place of employ to prove that his former boss defrauded him. While there he is "digitized", and sucked into a world of computer programs. The programs are oppressed by a "Master Control Program" (aka, the
Anyway, you can guess what happens next. Our lovable scamp hero must fight through the games (that he wrote) and team up with renegade programs to face the MCP and escape to the real world (I love that the programs refer to the "user" world as the "real" world--it's as if they're totally not buying the shtick either). Along the way, programs will fall in love with other programs, programs will resemble (indeed, and be mistaken for) their writers, and the few random, ahem, bits of science and computer science that were infused into the plot to make it seem clever will make your eyes roll back into your skull and out the other side. Like when our scamp/hero encounters a "bit", which can only answer yes or no questions, but does so in a comic-relief fashion. Or, my personal favorite grievance, when the windsail/yacht/thingy gets stuck on the beam of energy it's riding, and our hero uses his arm to re-direct the energy up to a different beam, and then explains it away as "basic physics". Yeah...
Okay, it's god-awful, moving on.
RoboCop is an interesting beast, but oddly enough there's some great sci-fi in it. It's directed with wonderful enthusiasm by Paul Verhoeven, who would later direct Starship Troopers (which is a fabulous movie if you like hard sci-fi and are smart enough to recognize parody when you see it). And the two movies use some of the same storytelling conventions, notably the way that newscasts and commercials punctuate the film throughout to provide quick exposition and comic relief.
The movie takes place in a futuristic Detroit that is controlled from within by crime (specifically a drug lord named Clarence Bodicker) and from without by a mega-corporation called Omni Consumer Products (or OCP) that owns everything--and I mean everything--including the police force. When a transfer named Murphy arrives and is brutally murdered by a drug gang, OCP uses him to create the prototype in the RoboCop line of products: cybernetic police officers that have the advanced armor, targeting, recording and computer-interface capabilities of a machine, but the reasoning and decision-making abilities of a human.
Classic, literary science fiction consisted mostly of reductio ad absurdum morality tales in which some facet of society would be played out to extremes and explored. They were philosophical thought experiments, and that nature has found its way into RoboCop. Okay, I don't want to overstate things--it's not like RoboCop is an overtly philosophical film, but the conflict of the plot arises from philosophical and social questions. What happens when you privatize/commoditize public services, such as the police force? Can something designed to combat injustice still be beholden to its creators if it finds out that its creators are corrupt? How is the humanity of society at odds with the mechanization of society? What happens when a man becomes "product"? None of these are necessary for a story about a robotic cop. But they give the world depth and make the story richer. Indeed, if this were re-made today, I would imagine that much of the subtext and depth would be eschewed in favor of more violence and gun fights. Actually, what I enjoyed most about this film is that most contemporary entertainment is about the hardening of our heroes--we cheer them on as they become stoic and, therefore (apparently), invincible. But RoboCop is just the opposite: a human is made into a machine, and thereby invincible and more stoic than you could imagine, but we watch as he slowly becomes more human.
Of course the film is far from perfect. For one, it's severely dated by the special effects technology and, to a lesser extent, fashion. Most of the characters seem relatively timeless, but you see a lot of people on the street who look very New Wave. But the stop motion animation and matte painted backdrops look extremely fake by today's digital standards. Also, there's a running bit that involves a Benny-Hill-esque television show in which a grizzled, red-headed man surrounded by swimsuit-clad beauties looks straight into the camera and utters his catchphrase: "I'd buy that for a dollar!" Every time this happens (and it happens like four or five times) whoever happens to be watching the television cracks up laughing. It's vaguely unnerving.
There's another running gag about the hot new car, the 6000 SUX, which is supposed to be this big bad fancy car, but it looks really stupid, it's not big at all by today's standards, and "SUX" is a little obvious, don't you think. Be that as it may, when the movie was over I found myself contemplating some of the questions that it had asked (and not answered), and I usually consider that good. Unlike Tron, which couldn't end soon enough. What's actually most telling to me is that Tron seemed to cobble a technology story together as an excuse to show off fancy effects, but RoboCop simply used fancy effects to tell an interesting story about society (that involved technology. So today, when most people know a little something about computers and programs and aren't afraid of communism anymore, Tron is laughable. But RoboCop, in spite of its visual shortcomings, still holds up. Privatizing public services is a real issue today, 20 years later, as is our ever-increasing dependence on technology.
Also, it was fun to be eight again.
]{
0 comments:
Post a Comment