In an era when Hollywood seems increasingly obsessed with how movies look rather than what they say, Tron: Ares is a case study in empty spectacle. Directors and studios have mastered the art of visual awe. Some directors flood screens with luminous effects and sleek design, but forget that style means nothing without soul. Joachim Rønning’s latest entry is just a two-hour screensaver.
Fifteen years ago, Tron: Legacy resurrected the 1982 tech fantasy with daft-punk glowstick styling. Now we have Ares and it has the task of rebooting a reboot. Watching across all three movies, the threadbare connection is tenuous and stretched over 43 years. The idea hasn’t changed much either. Life intersecting with digital consciousness: first one way into the virtual and now the other. The plot sounds cooler than it plays out on the screen.
Corporate hotshot Julian Dillinger, played by Evan Peters, has cracked a way to manifest programs from the grid into physical reality. However, these newly conjured digital creations only last a short time. But wouldn’t you know it … competing tech giant, Encom is working on the same tech innovation. Encom CEO Eve Kim, played by Greta Lee, uncovers the code everyone is looking for. Naturally, the sentient program Ares, played by Jared Leto, begins to question his existence, and soon he’s on the run with Eve. Why he decided to do this is a little murky, but there are no deep questions being asked here. So he’s dodging his way past drones, moral quandaries, and a script that seems half-generated by ChatGPT circa 2021.
That’s not to say the movie is devoid of pleasure. The film occasionally bursts into life during brief excursions into the Grid, where Nine Inch Nails’ industrial score creates a decent music video featuring sleek chase sequences. I want to love the chases but for all the frantic pacing, and constant references to the limits of time, none of it makes sense. The director completely abandoned the core time-dialation concept from the rest of the franchise, where hours and days on the grid are seconds in the real world. Then there is the fact that the newly set rules of this film are completely arbitrary. All of the digital constructs fall to pieces after 29 minutes, but they are constantly given tasks that would take hours to complete. Just driving from the compound where they come to life to anywhere in Seattle would take longer than 29 minutes.
And then there’s the clunky dialogue. Leto spouts off the old tired line “It doesn’t have to be like this!” and a CG brawl ensues. Someone yells about not understanding what it means to be alive or is awestruck by rain and confused by new feelings. The film attempts gravitas, like when Leto reads quotes from Frankenstein aloud, but it all feels extremely contrived.
It’s tempting to say Ares feels engineered for TikTok cringe. It’s fast, flashy, algorithm-friendly, and disposable. Even Jeff Bridges’ brief cameo as Kevin Flynn’s force ghost feels like a contractual obligation, not creative. Tron: Ares is a beautiful, but empty part of the trilogy, but the music is good and I think my kids will like it. 4/10
