Tron: Critic Reviews

Its computer sequences exist in a blue-gray scheme filled with flashing lights, speeding objects and dizzying motion. Its visual effects are wonderfully new. They are also numbing after a while.

A dazzling movie from Walt Disney in which computers have been used to make themselves romantic and glamorous. Here's a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun.

It's a simple idea that ought to serve, but Lisberger's failures of pacing, structure, variation, and characterization ultimately make the film seem monotonous and distant.

Tron is loaded with visual delights but falls way short of the mark in story and viewer involvement.

There's an undeniable cart-before-the-horse aspect to Tron...but Lisberger's film will always stand as a touchstone in the development of CGI as a storytelling tool... [Blu-ray]

Perhaps one of the more stunning features in motion picture history, creatively adapting mistakes and hunting invention, shaping a movie that displays such curiosity with technology and boldness with sci-fi fantasy.

...a hopelessly dated relic of the early 1980s...

Without the rosy filter of nostalgia, it's a virtually unwatchable virtual-reality saga.

Tron is at once a supremely silly movie and a groundbreaking one. It's best seen as the maiden voyage of an expedition that has led us to wonders like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies and Avatar.

Tron didn't just come up with a new special effects, it came up with new things to use those new kinds of special effects on.

It's as if Fritz Lang had set Metropolis, his silent, science-fiction classic, in a disco.

Not only does it introduce the humanity/technology themes that would surface in later cyberpunk fantasies, it boasts some of the most unique visuals in any film, then or now.

Although Tron's state-of-the-art, computer-generated visuals look primitive by current standards, it's intelligently conceived (on a visual level, at any rate) and largely good fun.

Tron never reaches a level of excitement commensurate with its effects budget.

The movie's innovative digital special effects were jaw-dropping at the time and still seem pretty cool. But somehow the plot congeals early into an old-time medieval epic and gets pretty dull.

Dated effects, of course, but still nerdy fun after all these years.

One of those rare movies that manages to be silly and cool and important all at once.