Early in Tron: Ares, tech bro Julian Dillinger (the X-Men movies’ Evan Peters) tries to get the U.S. military to invest in his electronics company Dillinger Systems by giving a presentation where he 3D prints a futuristic tank and an AI construct to drive it. He hopes that if he dazzles his audience, they won’t examine his product too closely and discover that everything he’s built crumbles after just 29 minutes. It’s a pretty good metaphor for the film itself, which is extremely stylish but lacks the depth or ambition that could give it real staying power.
Steven Lisberger’s 1982 film Tron was groundbreaking for its use of CGI and focus on video gaming, inspiring a host of imitators with its blend of mysticism, wild visuals, and anxiety about artificial intelligence. Joseph Kosinski’s 2010 sequel Tron: Legacy clumsily doubled down on the mysticism and pushed the boundaries of CGI further than they were ready to go by de-aging Tron star Jeff Bridges. The CGI in Joachim Rønning’s Tron: Ares looks better than anything the franchise has done before, but the script from Jesse Wigutow just reuses story beats and themes from the past two films.
An opening montage of news broadcasts serves as an info dump explaining the nature of the Grid, Tron’s virtual realm of sentient computer programs, and the state of the world’s biggest tech corporations. The fate of Encom CEO Kevin Flynn (Bridges) is still a mystery, and his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund in Tron: Legacy, entirely absent from this movie), has stepped back from the company, which is now led by Eve Kim (Greta Lee of Russian Doll). There is no explanation for how Eve wound up in control of one of the world’s most powerful companies, or why her sister was obsessed with Flynn’s disappearance. But Eve does check all the boxes for a Tron protagonist, in that she’s an extremely talented programmer and gamer who can hold her own in a light-cycle race.
Eve and Julian (the grandson of original Tron villain Ed Dillinger) are both searching for a “Permanence Code” Flynn invented to allow things from the Grid to exist stably in the real world. Like her biblical namesake, Eve wants to share the knowledge with the world (she uses a fruit tree to test the technology), while Julian is focused on generating military hardware and AIs he names for Greek war gods. Neither character has any real depth, though at least Peters seems to have fun chewing the scenery.
In an inversion of the power dynamics of the past two movies, Julian is the user giving orders to Master Control Program Ares (Jared Leto), whom he tasks with figuring out what Eve knows about the Permanence Code. But as Ares cyberstalks Eve and pursues her in the physical world, he decides he wants to help her instead. The creepiness of this relationship is played for laughs, which feels especially off-putting given that Leto has been accused of preying on young women. The Suicide Squad and Morbius star plays Ares with a flat affect that’s meant to evoke his artificial nature, but his attempts at deadpan wit don’t land. Jodie Turner-Smith (The Acolyte), who plays Ares’ lieutenant Athena, does a far better job showing how her emotions clash with her programming.
Eve has a whole support staff of poorly rendered Encom employees, while Julian has his AIs and overbearing mother Elisabeth Dillinger (a tragic waste of Gillian Anderson). The script glosses over the sexism inherent in viewing Elisabeth as a caretaker of Dillinger Systems whose purpose is just to pass control of the company from one brilliant man to another, relegating her to a ham-fisted metaphor for how little control parents have over their creations. Just in case you didn’t get it, Ares also reads and quotes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
As thin as the characters and plot are, Tron: Ares’ action sequences are stunning. The 29-minute time limit for game constructs imported into the physical world forces the story to move at a frantic pace, as AIs race to reach their targets before they disintegrate. It also allows numerous fights to have clever resolutions, with characters working to run out the clock or prevent the digital constructs from respawning.
The Daft Punk soundtrack was the best part of Tron: Legacy, and the Nine Inch Nails album written for Tron: Ares similarly elevates even lackluster scenes. There are haunting sequences that evoke Vangelis’ Blade Runner score and more propulsive tracks that perfectly complement the fast-paced action.
Directors often struggle to make hacking scenes entertaining, but Rønning makes excellent use of Tron’s two worlds. Scenes of Julian gleefully cracking into his rival’s system at a keyboard are juxtaposed with Ares leading a squad to infiltrate a gorgeous digital forest representing Encom’s servers. But Rønning abandons this dynamic when Eve’s allies hack back later in the film.
Tron: Ares checks all the Tron boxes with visual dazzle. The light cycles leave hard-light trails (“jetwalls”) that can slice other vehicles in half. The obligatory solar-sailer chase to the portal between worlds features explosive action contrasting with the ethereal beauty of the Grid. Bridges is rendered in a glowing ethereal quality befitting of the cosmic role he plays in the franchise.
A paint-by-numbers approach to sequel-making works for the Jurassic Park franchise, if only because it’s the go-to series for fans who want to watch people get eaten by dinosaurs. But just about every big-budget science fiction film these days is about reckless corporations and rogue AIs. Avengers: Age of Ultron already juxtaposed rogue AIs with the challenge of parenting and CGI-driven spectacle, while Ex Machina is a far richer story of a self-actualizing AI breaking free of a tech-bro creator. By comparison, Wigutow writes about companies racing to change the world, but relies on well-worn tropes and black-and-white morality. Rønning’s dazzling action sequences and the killer soundtrack might be enough to satisfy fans, but Tron: Ares feels just as likely to get lost among a sea of the type of films Tron inspired.
Tron: Ares opens in theaters on Oct. 10.
0 Comments