Steven Spielberg’s new READY PLAYER ONE turns videogaming into both a fantasy adventure and a meta-narrative about adventure fantasies, a premise that feels directly inspired — and given Ernest Cline’s source novel, almost certainly is — by Steven Lisberger’s 1982 Disney oddity TRON. Before digging into what connects the two films, we dive into TRON’s glow-y, rudimentarily CGI-ed mainframe to consider the bits and bytes that drive this fascinatingly flawed film, from its confusing religious undertones (overtones?) to its strange real world/virtual world disconnect. Plus, we continue to wade through the ocean of feedback on our episodes pairing STALKER and ANNIHILATION.
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Outro music: “Only Solutions” by Journey (TRON OST)
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