Josh Reviews Tron: Ares

Tron: Ares is the third Tron movie. It’s also, unfortunately, the third mediocre Tron movie.

What an interesting sort-of franchise Tron is!  I have a lot of fondness in my heart for the original 1984 Tron.  Steven Lisberger’s film was incredibly innovative and influential.  But even watching Tron as a kid in the eighties, I recognized that the movie didn’t quite work.  It was filled with big ideas, but I always found it a little boring.  (Click here for my detailed thoughts on the original Tron.)

Decades later, in 2010, a sequel was made, Tron: Legacy.  I was very excited for it, but I found it underwhelming.  Directed by Joseph Kosinski (who went on to make Top Gun: Maverick and the recent F1), the film looks gorgeous.  It was incredible seeing the visual style on Tron updated so effectively, and the soundtrack by Daft Punk is extraordinary.  But the characters are flat, and the story didn’t feel fully fleshed out to me.  (Click here to read my original review.)

Now here we are again, fifteen years later, and I feel very similarly about Tron: Ares.  The film has some stunning visuals and a fantastic soundtrack (this time created by Nine Inch Nails), but the characters are flat and the story was disappointingly simple, missing opportunities to develop and deepen what had gone before.

It also left me asking, like Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, “uh, now eventually, you do plan to have some Tron in your Tron movie, right?”

I guess not…

Shall we dig in a little further?  Minor spoilers ahead, though I’ll keep my comments in broad strokes.

I’m bummed though not surprised that Tron: Ares basically drops all efforts at following up on characters or storylines from the previous two films.  Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) and Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who were the main characters of Tron: Legacy, are ignored; the movie doesn’t tell us anything about what happened to them.  (No, I was not satisfied by that quick mid-credits tease suggesting a follow-up film we will likely never see.)  Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) appears in one scene (which I enjoyed, but which completely contradicts elements of Tron: Legacy).  Back in 2010, I was annoyed that Tron: Legacy completely sidelined the titular character Tron.  (Bruce Boxleitner appears in Legacy for a few scenes in the “real” world, and there’s a character glimpsed briefly in the digital world who we’re told is Tron, but he’s always hidden behind a helmet — presumably so they wouldn’t have to deal with digitally de-aging Mr. Boxleitner — and he had nothing to do in the story.)  I’d been hoping that a future Tron sequel would find a way to involve this character and tell the story of what happened to him after his heroism in the first film.  Instead, Tron: Ares ignores Tron completely.  I guess the filmmakers are hoping (probably correctly) that general audiences just assume that Tron refers to the digital realm, and not to a specific character.  But I’m disappointed.

So who/what is this film about?  The main character is a digital program called Ares.  He’s built to be an expendable warrior but realizes that his boss (Julian Dillinger) is evil, so he escapes into the real world and helps heroine Eve Kim, the CEO of Encom (Flynn’s company).  I was concerned when I read that Mr. Leto would be the star of this new Tron movie, because I have generally not connected to his performances (for instance, I thought his version of the Joker in David Ayers’ Suicide Squad really missed the mark), and the reports of his allegedly problematic behavior are distasteful.  In this movie, Mr. Leto is… fine.  He’s not bad, but I found the character flat and boring.  There’s little to no variation in Mr. Leto’s performance; he’s quiet and sort of robotic throughout.  I know Ares is artificial, but there’s a vast history in sci-fi of robotic/artificial characters who are complex and interesting and become beloved characters.  That doesn’t happen here.  Mr. Leto is done no favors by the script, that doesn’t bring any complexity or new ideas to Ares’ journey from automaton to being a real boy.

I was far more interested in Greta Lee (Russian Doll) as Encom’s CEO Eve Kim, who is trying to find a way out of grief for her lost sister.  Ms. Lee is a charismatic performer, and the few times the movie allows Eve to step into the focus, I thought the story perked up.  I certainly did as a viewer.  But despite Ms. Lee’s efforts, there isn’t much depth given to this character, and she’s too-often sidelined as a damsel who needs saving by Ares.  (I wish the story had allowed them to better work together at the end.  Eve gets to be brave in leading her pursuers away from her friends, but still basically her role is to run and hide.)

Evan Peters (X-Men: Days of Future Past, WandaVision, Mare of Easttown) is always a delight on screen, and he brings a fun energy to his role as manic, spoiled Julian Dillinger, the young CEO of Dillinger systems.  There’s not much depth to this character — are you noticing a trend in my comments? — he’s a dumb, spoiled, cruel brat.  But Mr. Peters is fun to watch chewing the scenery.  I like his pairing with Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) as his mother, Elisabeth Dillinger.

Jodie Turner-Smith is a stand-out as Athena; Ares’ colleague-turned-enemy.  Ms. Turner-Smith brings an imposing physical energy to the performance.  (And what a voice!)  I wish she had more to do in the film; I wish they gave her character more depth and explored her feelings about having to go against her former comrade.  Nevertheless, Ms. Turner-Smith makes Athena a great villain.

I liked seeing Arturo Castro as Eve’s colleague Seth Flores, and I enjoyed his light comedic touch.  But watching the movie I had no idea who this character was supposed to be.  Was Seth Eve’s boyfriend?  Sibling?  Co-worker?  I thought he was her boyfriend for the first half of the film, and I think I’m wrong, but I’m still not sure.  (There’s some flirtation between Eve and Ares, but the movie never develops that into an actual romance.)  Hasan Minhaj does his best as another of Eve’s colleagues, Ajay Singh, but he has even less to do.  (Ajay and Eve seem to be at odds at the start of the movie; it’d have been nice had the movie developed that conflict before forcing them to work together to stop Athena.)

Jeff Bridges appears in one scene in the film, and it’s Jeff Bridges so of course the scene is great.  I love hearing Mr. Bridges channeling that old Kevin Flynn hippie energy and saying “man” at the end of sentences.  I wish they’d found a way to make Mr. Bridges a more important part of this movie.  Having him as an Obi-Wan Kenobi type character could have been a blast.

OK, I’ve written a number of paragraphs basically saying the story is flat.  It’s worth at least a few sentences talking about the visuals and the music, which are great.

I can understand the appeal of the concept of having the digital Tron characters and vehicles enter our “real” world.  That’s a good hook for a story and a good choice for a third Tron movie.  I loved seeing a light-cycle chase happen in real city streets (with their solid-light trails causing a wake of damage behind them).  That’s cool, and that chase sequence was well-executed.  And there’s a lot of third act fun to be had when Athena brings her bad guys into our world.  I loved seeing a huge Recognizer (the iconic Tron bad guy ship, which originated in Flynn’s Space Paranoids video game) hovering over the city and wreaking havoc.  (It’s too bad they spoiled that in all the trailers, though.)  The iconography from 1984’s Tron remains memorable and cool.  Is it a bit simplistic to bathe all the Tron stuff in red lights this time, so we know they’re evil?  Yes, but 1) that’s baked into the original Tron and 2) red and black remains a cool and striking combination.

BEWARE SPOILERS IN THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH: There’s a sequence in which Ares has to go inside one of Kevin Flynn’s old computers from the eighties, and it’s cool to see a recreation of the 1984 Tron look.  That was a lot of fun!  In many ways this sequence was a highlight of this movie for me.  The only problem was that Tron: Legacy implied that the AI world we saw was the same world as that seen in Tron.  It looked different, but I interpreted that as if this was what we were always meant to have seen.  (Another possibility was that, as the computers developed in the real world, so too did the complexity of the artificial world also develop.)  So this sequence in Tron: Ares feels to me a direct contradiction of Legacy, which bugs me.  In presenting this “original” AI world looking like it did in 1984, it suggests that in Legacy, Flynn, Tron, etc. somehow journeyed to a different city and AI world, which was pretty clearly not the case.  (Their explanation for the presence of Flynn within this old computer also feels like a contradiction with Legacy.  This is a digital copy of Flynn, but in Legacy, it was the actual Flynn who had been living in the AI world for years.  So why would this digital copy exist?  When was it created?  Why is it aging like the real Jeff Bridges?  I can sort of forgive all that to get to see Jeff Bridges, but it’s annoying, and it would be less of a problem if the rest of the film’s story felt more coherent and of a piece with the previous two Tron films.

The score by Nine Inch Nails is a banger, elevating many sequences in this movie and bringing things to life.  Trent Reznor has been behind some incredible film scores (notably The Social Network), and this collaboration with Atticus Ross is top-notch.  It has a different feel from Daft Punk’s spectacular score for Tron: Legacy, but it’s equally effective and memorable.  This intense soundtrack, combined with the cool visuals, made me glad I’d seen Tron: Ares in a theatre, with a huge screen and a pumping sound-system.

On the other hand, this film’s weak story makes it hard to recommend.  I had fun watching this, but there’s no question that once again I have been disappointed by a Tron film.  I believe that this concept and this world remains cool.  It should be even more interesting and relevant in today’s world with A.I. so much a presence in our lives!!  Maybe someday some filmmakers will be able to figure out how to do Tron right.

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