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The point is this: I grew up (sort of) as science fiction was really coming into its own in film. During the early 1950s, movie producers, their backs pushed against the economic wall by that nasty newcomer known as TV, decided to pull out all the stops in order to try to lure large audiences back into a nation of half-empty movie theaters.
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Science fiction, of course, has changed over the years. For better or worse, audiences today want verisimilitude in their celluloid SF. (Way back when, it didn't really matter if films like Invaders from Mars or The Day the Earth Stood Still were endorsed by Carl Sagan or not. You were satisfied that the movie scared the hell out of you or maybe put a couple of new thoughts in your skull.)
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Which, in a perversely circuitous way, brings us to TRON, Walt Disney Studios' recent, opulent, computer-graphics-drenched adventure. Touted by its creators as the computerized equivalent of The Wizard of Oz, TRON is, in a word, disappointing.
Why?
Because, like the Tin Woodsman who once stumbled through the first, uncomputerized Oz, TRON lacks something that all good movies must have a lot of. . . heart. […]
