Once avant-garde and innovative, this film feels archaic and old as an arcade game, and has an absolutely miserable script.
I'm not sure what Disney was thinking when they decided to make this film, but I understand the concept and the reasons that led the studio to bet on something like this. In the 1980s, the creation and gradual massification of the computer (a huge box that we see in the movie and which is now primitive compared to the machines we use) generated a “fever” around computing and led to the creation of games that, later, the World Wide Web has taken it to another level. The movie came out when personal computers started to become popular in the US, but here in my country it took about fifteen years to happen. It's extraordinary to think about this, and how quickly things have evolved. I am thirty-two years old, I belong to a generation that still lived its childhood without technologies, but I was a teenager when they started to become something more visible in our lives. So I can understand why this movie was made, but being a Disney movie, I confess I was expecting better.
The film has an uninspired cast made up of third-rate actors. Among all the (almost) anonymous names, only David Warner stands out. The film also has one of the worst dramatic interpretations of Jeff Bridges' life. He was still young here, but the film's material and style didn't help him do a satisfying job. In fact, I blame the screenwriters for most of the film's problems, as they weren't able to come up with a decent story that would justify the feature film. The story that the film brings us is based on the journey of a human being inside the computer, where he will basically have to play and beat opponents. This is very little and it bores us quickly. It seems like a mere excuse for the studio to make an experiment in the field of CGI and the application of technology in cinema.
Where the film really bets heavily is on the visuals, heavily stylized and inspired by two obvious elements: the integrated circuits used in engineering and the colorful and (now) somewhat forgotten neon lights. In those late 1980s, neon was something that drew attention in the urban landscape, and there was no street or square where, at dusk, dozens of neon signs did not light up. It's something that has virtually disappeared in the last decade, but that gave the city a certain life. I confess that I felt some nostalgia when feeling the aesthetic influences of all that, but I recognize that the film tried to do something far ahead of its time: the Hollywood Academy itself refused to nominate this film for an Oscar because it considered that CGI was a form of cheating. And perhaps also because they did so early, the resources used were so rudimentary (even though they were the best there was) that they gave the film an extremely heavy and dated look, which aged very poorly. The same can be said of the sound effects and even that soundtrack, so dominated by the synthesizer.