Stream It or Skip It?

The reality of Tron: Ares (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) raises all manner of questions. For one, has anyone been clamoring for a new movie in the franchise, considering 1982’s Tron is more of a cult curiosity than a classic, and its 2011 sequel Tron: Legacy is memorable only for its terrible rotoscoping of Jeff Bridges in his younger form? Who thought Jared Leto was capable of leading a $200 million Disney tentpole? And is anyone surprised that it fizzled at the box office, with a $142 million worldwide gross? The most notable blip of interest came from the all-new-material Nine Inch Nails score/soundtrack – following suit with Legacy’s prominent Daft Punk contributions – which is crucial to appreciating the movie: I recommend disengaging the brain, cranking the volume and treating it like the most expensive music video ever made. 

TRON: ARES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Well, this is the rough part – summarizing a plot that does not want anyone to think too hard about it. The good news is, you don’t need to remember a damn thing about Tron: Legacy to appreciate the nonsense that Ares gives us. More notable than any of the silly events of the film is how the OG blue color palette has morphed to an orangey-red, and instead of Tron “warriors” tossing round Frisbees, they’re now triangular, uh, Frisbees. Can Frisbees be triangular? Or are they more boomerang than Frisbee once you un-round them? The mind boggles! I can report that, thankfully, the wheels on lightcycles are still round, and they go faster than ever, perhaps because they’re trimmed with orangey-red now. EVERYONE knows red is always and forever faster than blue!

Anyway. Where was I? Right: the stuff you shouldn’t think too hard about. At this point in the not-too-far-off future, two gigantic tech companies are going head-to-head to prove who has the biggest digital dick. (I know: phrasing.) You’re familiar with ENCOM, the video-game company formed by Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn character in the first movie; it’s now run by Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who’s made sure this is a non-evil corporation. You might remember Flynn’s nemesis was a guy named Dillinger, who formed Dillinger Systems, currently CEO’d by his grandson Julian (Evan Peters), who’s turning the corp evil after his mother Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson) stepped down. So, what’s the ethical dividing line between these two giants? Eve wants to use AI to solve things like hunger and poverty, while Julian uses it to create weapons for gazillion-dollar military contracts. So essentially what we’ve got here is War vs. Peace and you needn’t ponder any deeper than that, although you may want to note that the NIN synths do that unsettling deep-warbling thing during the early Dillinger sequences, indicating that these shitbirds shouldn’t be trusted.

We watch as Julian demonstrates Dillinger’s new product: A giant 3-D laser printer that can make tanks that destroy the living hell ‘n’ crap outta things – and rootin’-tootin’ mean-as-hell AI soldiers, led by Ares (Leto) and his first lieutenant Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith). What Julian doesn’t reveal to his shareholders is that all the stuff what gets laser-printed only exists for 29 minutes before it crumbles to dust, which is far from ideal. When that happens, Ares goes back to standing around in his office inside a computer, waiting for orders and slowly becoming sentient and yearning to be a Real Boy. 

To fix the 29-minute self-destruct problem, Julian needs the Permanence Code. To no one’s surprise, Eve has discovered that exact code on one of Flynn’s old machines, which is in a big tent in Alaska for some reason. Eve uses the tech to 3-D-print an orange tree, which doesn’t go kaflooey after 29 minutes, proving the code works, but it also prompts one to pause and wonder what the nutritional value of a 3-D-printed digital orange might be, and if the tree, like Ares, exists inside of computer until it’s printed, or if it’s created out of nothing, or – hey, stop this shit you’re doing with your brain! Here, have a lightcycle chase through downtown Vancouver! It’s f—ing RAD! Especially with NIN rumbling behind it!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Tron: Ares funnels some rote RoboCop and Pinocchioisms through the action-heavy Tron filter, with hints of AI sagas ranging from masterpieces like Ex Machina and the two Blade Runners to, uh, Chappie. 

Performance Worth Watching: Considering Leto’s off-screen persona, it’s not much of a challenge for him to play an off-putting robotic weirdo. So this acknowledgment goes to Lee, who’s far better than anything this drooler of a screenplay gives her; it works wholly to her advantage that she doesn’t seem to be taking any of it seriously (and frankly, the film as a whole should’ve taken her tonal lead).  

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: Tron: Ares is the Derek Zoolander of sci-fi movies: Impressively stylish but painfully dumb. Its vigorously rendered visual aesthetic is the piercing Blue Steel gaze, and it struts down the runway with irrepressible confidence. Just don’t ask it to explain what it’s doing, or why, because it’s likely to shrug and mumble something unintelligible. The film is like an Olympic-sized pool with a big hole in it – it may have great capacity for depth of ideas, but they all drain out with an alarming quickness. It awkwardly shoehorns in legacy content (yes, Jeff Bridges gets an extended third-act cameo as Flynn) and is narratively scatterbrained; anything deeper than the basic conflict rattles around like nuts and chocolate bits in a jar when it should be tight and compact like a candy bar.

Now that I’m done flogging metaphors with a VGA monitor cable, I’ll revisit the assertion that Ares is best appreciated as a sensory experience. The wow lookit the FUTURE! visual effects are brilliant, popping nicely on a big screen in a dark room. The considerably less exciting scenes in which people stand around and talk come off like videos you watch while you wait in a 140-minute line for the Tron ride at Disney World (which, ironically, is an old-school rollercoaster, not a 3-D simulator ride). 

The throbbing NIN score shades the film in sinister and mysterious tones, or summons a mighty pulse to enhance the thrill and tension of the action scenes, which make extraordinary use of lightcycles, the OG horseshoe-shaped “recognizers” and newly Tronified jetskis and gliders, all of which leave behind laser trails that can cut a cop car in half or render an F-14 wingless. That the sensory experience will inevitably be lesser at home than in the theater (I originally saw it in a thundering true-IMAX auditorium) is a given, but it nevertheless remains functional.

The core idea here has potential, reversing the Tron modus operandi by bringing the digital creations into the real world instead of putting real people in the digital world. But beyond that, the screenplay is disappointingly simplistic and sloppy, disinterested in our current real-world cultural milieu surrounding AI, or anything deeper than a few flimsy ironies and the TOTALLY MIND-BLOWING implications of Ares being awakened to sentience by the existence of Depeche Mode, the tech-pop band that merges electronical sounds with whaddayacallem, human emotions. Such symbolism!

Ares is helmed by Joachim Ronning, who toed the line for Disney with the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. His work is highly competent, the director as skilled at not making corporate suits upset as he is at overseeing wildly enjoyable action sequences. Ares has panache, but its barely engaged storytelling betrays how egregiously Not Art it is. 

Our Call: Tron: Ares is a movie at odds with itself – the music and visuals draw us in, while the donutbrained story routinely pulls us out. I guess two out of three ain’t bad? STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.