The magnificent scenes of heroism, transcendence and man dominating his surroundings should please the most masculinist among us, including Ayn Rand and Leni Riefenstahl:


The close-ups all have that overly melodramatic silent-era quality to them. Note the way Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has Valentino eyes and Sark (David Warner) looks like a Conrad Veidt villain:


The neon destruction is one of the best visual features of TRON, and I particularly love the Art Deco explosion of the light cycle running into the wall:

Here are some be-yoo-tee-ful shots of various control chambers:


These next three shots are probably the result of Moebius's designs, but in terms of color and shading, the first two remind me of Fleischer Studio's Superman cartoon (itself borrowing heavily from German Expressionism):


This next series points to the way TRON takes the acute Expressionistic angles and frequently pushes them towards abstraction. As can be seen in the third shot, those same angles are used in the realworld, as well:

Undoubtedly, the grid is the most recurring motif in the film (just look at the shots above). Despite the sheer daftness of TRON's storyline, the film provides a persistent visual critique of modern existence under technology centering on the grid. The realworld doesn't look all that different from the simulated one, just in duller, Modernist colors. If anything, the oppression of the office cubicles is far more of a labyrinthine mindfuck than the prison in TRON (Bruce Boxleitner)'s world. This use of office space here is every bit the equal to that in Billy Wilder's The Apartment and Jacques Tati's Playtime:

Little wonder that so many prefer escaping reality into videogame simulacra. Where would you rather be, with Lora (Cindy Morgan) in her lab, or with her cyberpunk avatar, Yori?


Thus, when Flynn gets reconstructed by the Master Control Program (MCP; Warner again) into the world of cyber-spectacle, the film visually suggests there's little ontological difference between the two states, online versus offline -- on or off the grid. Life itself has become a simulation:

Despite the standardized happy ending where modern life has been saved from the evil MCP, the time-lapse photography of the city at daytime turning into night before the credits roll suggests something else, namely that we're never too far away from the oppressive regime of the MCP. Note how similar the night-time city is to the mindscape travel sequence of the title sequence: