CGI is hardly imaginable in modern cinema; many blockbusters are shot against the greenscreen so that effects can be easily inserted. A film from 1982 that revolutionized digital cinema was a huge flop and was even condemned by critics for its CGI.
In 1982, the science fiction film Tron by Disney was released. The programmer Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, gets sucked into a computer program where Master Control reigns. There, he tries to defeat Master Control with Tron and escape from cyberspace, where both must play dangerous games.
The film was groundbreaking at the time in terms of its computer effects. 15 minutes of the film were animated solely by computer and represented a new technical advancement for that time. However, it was seen less as a revolution in cinema and more as a great danger to art. The film was not only a financial flop but also received poor reviews. The Academy disqualified the film from the Oscars despite its groundbreaking production.
Revolutionary yet damned
In an interview at Comic Con in San Diego 2010, Vanity Fair spoke with Joseph Kosinski, the director of Tron: Legacy, about the original Tron being undervalued at the time. Regarding the disqualification from the Oscars, Kosinski says the following:
There is an interesting irony in the fact that the original Tron was disqualified from the Academy Awards in that year in the category of visual effects because the use of a computer was seen as cheating.
He states that the themes of the film, such as having avatars in an online world, were far ahead of their time. Tron was an unusual film that looked like nothing before it, and since then, nothing has really looked like Tron.
When watching the original Tron today, the effects appear outdated and almost ugly. However, using digital animation to create a video game world in 1982 and bring it to theaters was an innovative endeavor.
In the interview, he also compares Tron to Blade Runner from the same year, which was a financial flop but still became a cult film.
Ultimately, Tron was only appreciated for its technology years later, even though the film had faded from the pop culture memory. It was only films like Terminator 2 that brought computer effects into the mainstream. Nowadays, CGI effects are indispensable, and films that largely forgo them are the exceptions.
These days, excessive CGI effects tend to provoke laughter, especially in the big Marvel universe:
Quantumania is supposed to look better than Oppenheimer? At least that’s what the Oscars 2023 say.
