TRON: ARES
2025
Directed by Joachim Ronning
Written by David DiGilio and Jesse Witugow
I went into TRON: Ares with about the worst attitude it'd be possible to have without having already decided I was going to have a bad time with it—and, well, not to jump straight to the surprising reversal or anything, but yes, I do suppose that's exactly what a whole bunch of other people did with it, to the extent that any whole bunch of people even went to go see Disney's now-customary quarterly box office flop in the first place. Still, there is, I think pretty objectively, much less affirmative purpose to do a TRON here in 2025 than there was with the original film in 1982, or with its legacy sequel, fittingly enough named TRON: Legacy, in 2010: that first movie is possibly the most entirely sui generis visual experience I've ever witnessed, nothing like it before or since, groundbreaking in its integration of computer generated imagery, and that's a part of it, though where it shines (literally glows) is in its contemporary analog techniques, the ones that turn its actors into programs and its blank black sets into a grid of mesmerizing backlit textures that sort of rake your eyeballs, but in a pleasurable way; Legacy was more conventional but took advantage of every advance in visual effects made since 1982, of which there were of course very many, to render the most exquisite version of "conventional" visual effects imaginable, the culmination and perfection of TRON's aesthetic by way of our cinema's digital future (even when it, too, was done more practically than is generally assumed, but even the LEDs sewn into the costumes would be, from the standpoint of 1982, "the future"). Meanwhile, even if Legacy did tell a maybe-it-was-profound, fuck-you story despite having the intentionally-stupid TRON as its basis (for it always bears repeating, before you decide to high-horse a TRON movie, that the entire franchise rests on the idea that little dudes inside your computer make it work, and I daresay every single person involved in its making from Steven Lisberger on down do, in fact, realize that that's dumb), I don't know why you'd want to try your luck on that twice.
Ares, on the other hand, comes fifteen years after Legacy and... looks pretty much exactly the same as Legacy, in terms of its technological fundamentals, which is exactly what you'd expect when those fifteen years weren't nearly as technologically revolutionary as the twenty-eight between Legacy and TRON, whereas, like I said, the TRON aesthetic probably got taken as far as it productively could be in Legacy already. Meanwhile, it barely even is a sequel to Legacy, which suits me fine—yes, of course I'd have been in the tank for Joseph Kosinski's TRON 3, it'd be disingenuous of me to claim otherwise, but that only means I'm weak. Legacy's "open" ending was more of a note of optimistic possibility than a sequel hook; it has always felt finished and complete.
Ares manages to be this much of a sequel: it takes that open ending—oh man, what if the programs entered the real world?—and builds its whole movie out from that idea, and I was extremely not excited for that, as it's essentially an admission that there aren't that many stories left to tell about the Grid, so while it's the "natural" extension of the stories that have been told, it also feels like the escalation you only take when you're done and desperate, because the principal point of TRON movies is not and has never been to "meditate on how technology is overtaking human existence," but to gaze upon pretty colors moving in a black void while listening to synth music. Bringing TRON into "our" world? Kind of defeats the purpose. It'd only be a bunch of incongruous design concepts looking preposterous against a backdrop that wasn't made to support them, and why would you ruin them like that? Or at least that would've been my prejudice. Other people have their own, though not, for use of the word "prejudice," necessarily unjustified: some people are just plum sick of Disney and their neverending campaign to turn every single IP they own into warmed-over slop, and, yeah, co-signed (though one minor silver lining of this movie is that it lets me know I haven't degenerated into a state of unreasoning blind hatred towards that company); some people hate Jared Leto, who is, and I will agree it's rather inexplicable, headlining this $200 million blockbuster as its hero (I've generally enjoyed Leto—as a performer, mind—though he's obviously better-suited to villains*).
The tangent that Ares takes, then, to pick up on Legacy fifteen years later, brings us into the heart of Dillinger Systems, the archrival to the purified Encom, which should have at least paid off on Cillian Murphy's weird cameo in Legacy, though you'll be unsurprised to learn they did not get him back, and he's been replaced by his Dillinger kid's sister or possibly sister-in-law (Gillian Anderson) and more importantly her son Julian (Evan Peters, and, you know, Peters arguably is only a lateral move from Murphy for the purposes of a TRON). They're at the work of evil, of course, and our introduction to Julian is staring up at him like a god from the viewpoint of his creation, presently brought into existence inside Dillinger's counter-Grid, which flips the cones that this sequel's going to be activating from Legacy's blues to new dark hell-reds, reflecting its demonic master. In case we doubt the symbolism, we witness Julian's creation be "trained"—brought to life only to be repeatedly destroyed, until it learns—and "he" is dubbed "Ares" (Leto), the Master Control Program, a broadly-defined "security" algorithm that rules over this Grid through lieutenants like Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) in the name of Dillinger, though Ares will also be the first to be brought out of the Grid as one of the 3-D printed living weapons that Julian's so eager to sell to every warmonger on Earth. "Fully proprietary, 100% disposable," is I believe the pitchline, but while his demonstration of his black-and-neon war machines and printable soldiers is impressive, there remains a small bug: not one of his toys can last more than 29 minutes before disintegrating into a pile of useless graphite trash.
On the other side, Encom, now run by Eve Kim (Greta Lee), has the same problem, though its leadership would prefer to use the technology for applications less unhealthy to children and other living things, and Eve's on a quest to find the "permanence code" that she's sure Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has hidden away somewhere for those sufficiently pure of heart to find. Lo, she does find it, but when Julian discovers she has it, he doesn't intend on letting her keep it, and sends Ares into the world to extract that code from Eve, or, if need be, from her digitized mind and body rendered onto the Grid, whether that leaves anything of her alive or not. And it is at this juncture that Julian's digital slave, his curiosity about humans piqued by his own victim's empathetic concern for his well-being, breaks free of his programming.
That's retelling it somewhat grandiloquently, which is (aptly, I'd say) the film's own primary mode, but it's a pretty stripped-down little action movie we've got here, and just because it's so obvious doesn't mean I shouldn't say it: it's Frankenstein mixed with The Terminator, so basically it's Terminator 2, which isn't the worst thing any movie could aspire to be. There aren't going to be many surprises squeezed out of this story unless you've literally never seen a movie about a robot before (not even the surprise-in-the-context-of-a-modern-blockbuster, of paying off on the fairly unmistakable remnants of a screenplay draft where Eve actually satisfies her blatant curiosity about Ares's potential for full functionality, which they apparently left in out of spite, or inertia, or the hope that fanfic writers would care enough to consummate it for them), but it's almost invariably sincere about the old story it's telling. And that, at least, gives it some power of belief that it must be saying something interesting about AI (it actually barely seems to realize that it's more "about" a faintly more-plausible version of Star Trek replicator technology than AI), and of all the prejudices one could bring to Ares, this is the one that I think has the most weight, given there's never been any moment since the advent of science fiction where telling of story about a good tech CEO overcoming a bad tech CEO, let alone why we ought to be nicer to our fucking computers, has been less useful than now. But it has faith in that story anyway, and tells it well, and Leto and Lee have good chemistry, surprisingly so (I don't know the last time I saw Leto have "chemistry," whereas Lee, rather fantastic here at Spielbergy, "lookit the awesome" acting, amongst other things, was probably the cast member I had the lowest expectations for, thanks to being miserably bad in her laureled breakout, Past Lives); then the function of the actual terminator in this Terminator turns out to be its strongest performance in Turner-Smith, effecting a wonderful mask of implacability in her single-minded inhumanity, without actually being single-minded or inhuman, with enough grace notes to wrench some sympathy out of you for a robot villain striving for recognition from her god and wondering why its fellow robot betrayed it.
Now, once we move away from the primary cast—Anderson excepted, who does much more than she needs to with a character that exists, principally, just to give Peters a scene partner while being malevolent—we very quickly fall off a cliff: Hasan Minhaj's subordinate Encom executive gets a "Unix system! I know this!" kind of a role that I wish didn't even exist, though this comedian is wholly blotted out by the film's other comedian, Arturo Castro, the sole element of the film that's affirmatively bad, and reaching downwards to affirmatively terrible, playing Eve's personal assistant so clingily and whinily and passive-aggressively that I spent a long time thinking he must be her loser boyfriend, which is undeniably my fault, though it's another point against Past Lives for priming me. He is, anyway, the reason I have to say "almost invariably" when describing Ares's sincerity, and he feels extraordinarily "notesed," even glued-on, to the extent I've idly wondered since how many actual shots he's in that Lee is also in, and how often he was making cringy pleas for attention on a set by himself. We also find Bridges getting pulled back in, and I will forthrightly state that "biodigital jazz, man" is a much better line than "it should've been called the impermanence code," because the former might be off-putting but at least it doesn't imply we're idiots who don't get the irony. So there's that, but it's otherwise never less than decent, and I appreciate that Ares isn't a blank, but a machine who's been thinking about human existence as a matter of theory for a long time but is not entirely prepared for the practicalities of it (and, purposefully or not—it's probably just pandering—that he's such a weird and incomplete human, afforded a personality, but mainly one made up of enthusiasm for 80s music).
So that's all fine, and worth defending, and not even remotely the movie's strength, nor should it be. It's a TRON so its strengths should be in its imagery and, moreover, its sound. Sound it's got: the production tapped Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and coaxed them into working under Reznor's Nine Inch Nails banner, probably for no better reason than Legacy having a score by "Daft Punk" and not "Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo," but it seems to have inspired them to actually hearken back to a more quintessential Nine Inch Nails sound than anything I've ever heard from them on film. Given the number of lyric singles they made "for" the movie, you could get the notion that it's a NIN musical, though these aren't really "in" the movie, and it's still some terrific industrial metal (or whatever) energy, and that energy's powering this thing, giving it an entirely different mood apart from Legacy as much as the it's-red-now glowy crap does, despite feeling no less technological than Daft Punk and Joseph Trapanese did. It's beautifully hideous (indeed, abrasive the way the first TRON's visuals were), with tones like a computer dying of torture, and it's afforded a measure of driving horniness as a matter of music (the lyric singles moreso, to be sure) such as I associate with classic NIN, and which is a pretty game choice for a movie that, after all, is about a yearning to take on flesh (nor does it hurt the whole vibe of menace that it's going for). Though, really, it's in the quantity: this has more score than just about any similarly-situated action film in years, and a loud score, mixed very high, like what it truly wants is to support the music with visuals more than the other way around.
And that brings us to Joachim Ronning, more-or-less a Disney employee, and while I cannot speak to his Pirates sequel or his Maleficent sequel, it's not a filmography that says much besides "I'm passionate... about career stability." And, nevertheless, "music-driven aesthetic experience" is exactly what he's delivered: it needs a couple of reels to get itself moving (it does have a nice aperitif in the form of a "hack" undertaken by our red programs inside Encom's blue-white, digi-utopian Grid), but once it does get moving, the next hour is constant audiovisual assault, a series of chases that essentially merges into one big chase that remains dizzyingly dynamic as regards who's chasing who now, and why, and in which world, using its deuteragonists' natural mistrust and that 29 minute time limit to complicate things quite a bit, yet with less dialogue than usual expended to make it work. Of course, it's at its best when the chase is still inside the Grid and we're surrounded by that maximalist austerity, and the movie is basically just an explosion of different shades of red pixels for five straight minutes, which I mean as a compliment. (Flynn's participation, incidentally, is less valuable for Bridges pontificating than for the modern recreation of TRON's "classic Grid," still lovingly replicating its pre-modern tech's weaknesses. It's nostalgia, but interesting enough to justify itself.)
Even so, "TRON in the physical world" turns out to be cooler to look at than I'd have thought; it helps that cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth takes pains to do exactly what Claudio Miranda did on Legacy to try to make the nighttime streets a visual extension of the Grid, and coating his city with a metallic sheen; it does crucial work on behalf of e.g. lightcycles tearing ass down an actual road while actually minimizing that image's inevitable silliness, even if the staging of that particular phase of the chase is still happily goofing it up, not even trying to explain why both those lightcycles are spitting out their razorsharp tails, except for the obvious reason that "it should prompt some spectacular destruction." It's arguably a mistake that this movie ever leaves nighttime, but I like that it can find varied tones, so while I've shat on the script's comic relief, the filmmaking can manage some very funny beats inside the action—the "temporary downshift" part of that big long chase involves Ares driving a regular car in daylight, and the film quietly acknowledging that this looks ridiculous even if he's still driving it at 100mph through traffic, while the showdown that culminates this act-long action sequence got a big, idiotic laugh out of me by way of a big, idiotic GAME OVER screen on an arcade game that a tertiary character has just been bludgeoned half to death with, which feels like the most essentially 80s moment in a movie that references the 80s at least a dozen times.
I was basically unlimited in my delight over TRON: Ares at this point, then, and wondering how high I'd go (effectively, just wondering how harshly I'd have to punish it for Castro), except it's a movie where its first part is just better. It eventually does have to actually downshift into slower scenes, and it never picks back up enough momentum to match that glorious first half, which is sort of the opposite of how an action movie ought to behave (Reznor & Ross are following suit, and that might well be a cause, not a consequence). It never gets close to "bad," though if I've expressed pleasant surprise that the "real world" sequences are better than they sounded like (or even appeared to be, from the trailers), and even if there's a charm to a recognizer floating impassively through skyscraper canyons, there is absolutely no question in my mind that this movie still needed to go back to the Grid to find its finale, because that's what TRON movies so obviously live and die on. There are individual beats I still love in the finale we get (Turner-Smith really is very good), and I appreciate that this is kept as pared-down as it is, under two hours and focused, despite the ever-present threat of Disneyfied bloat (even if I'm kind of actively annoyed that pound-away-at-a-keyobard "hacking" is part of the finale, when hacking has been established in this movie to "actually" be little dudes engaging in violent ribbon dancing with lightglaives, so we could've had a whole cross-cut affair that might well have found that missing momentum again). So it gets itself backwards. But it turns out that "third-best TRON movie" isn't nearly as dishonorable as I feared it'd be.
Score: 8/10
*I've never gotten around to the infamous Morbius in part because I'm just not that interested in seeing him play a good vampire. But an evil vampire? Now that checks out!
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