RATING
Director(s): Joachim Ronning
Country: United States
Author: Jesse Wigutow, David DiGilio, Steven Lisberger
Actor(s): Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Jeff Bridges
Written by Tom Augustine
There’s never been a whole lot of demand for TRON. The original, a simplistic adventure story elevated by painstaking visual effects work, is a children’s movie with an adult’s visual sensibility. Its scripting and performance are at-times staggeringly wooden, but the feeling the imagery generates aligns it with era-defining fantasy, sci-fi and anime, particularly visually resplendent work like 1988’s Akira. A cult item, by the 2010s it had largely been eclipsed by The Matrix, a more serious, satisfying and expansive digital world in which to lose yourself. That same period saw Disney (and other companies) diving into their extensive vaults, greenlighting legasequels and reboots of properties that had been gathering dust on a shelf somewhere for decades. TRON: Legacy was just one of a raft of these — think John Carter, Speed Racer, Battleship, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Independence Day: Resurgence, and many more. While the large majority of these withered and died on the vine, kicking off the modern era of safe-bet IP churn in Hollywood, TRON: Legacy was a modest commercial success, if not one that set the world on fire. The TRON series has potentially the slowest generation rate of any major Hollywood property — it was nearly thirty years before the first sequel emerged, another fifteen between that film and the latest entry, TRON: Ares. There’s a scrappy, endearing quality to the property that belies its sleek, virtual world of gleaming surfaces — unlike its great competitor, TRON is more than willing to be a bit goofy, to cater to the basest instincts that come with flashing lights, dizzying computer-generated imagery and eclectic electronic soundtracks. For all its futurism, there’s a modesty to TRON — it’s not going to change the world, and that’s okay.
Will TRON: Ares be the series’ final outing? Disney, in producing the film, have not done themselves a lot of favours. Key among these is the casting of Jared Leto as the film’s new lead, the AI soldier Ares. Leto’s star-power had been on the wane long before the allegations of nine different women this year, including some underage, shone a spotlight on a history of predatory behaviour. There’s been ample suggestion that this was something of an open secret in Hollywood, one that Disney certainly should have had the foresight in swerving away from — not even taking into account the abject failures of Leto’s attempted vehicles like Suicide Squad and Morbius, and the stories of inappropriate behaviour that trailed behind them. An array of strong cast-members dot TRON: Ares, enough that Leto’s presence is even more nonplussing — it’s an own-goal of bewildering scale. Whether or not Disney’s hobbled marketing campaign will drive a death-nail into TRON’s operating system is yet to be seen. Thankfully, much of TRON: Ares is suitably involving, the early acts of the film genuinely, propulsively thrilling. The AI soldier Ares has been created by Julian Dillinger, of Dillinger Systems — grandson of the original Tron baddie Ed Dillinger (David Warner). Their company is in a race with ENCOM, the tech outfit originally headed by Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) to find the ‘permanence code’, which will allow artificial intelligence programs to exist in our world without being prone to disintegration (or ‘deresolution’, as the series puts it). ENCOM is now headed by Eve Kim (Greta Lee), whose sister died before revealing the code to the world, hiding it in an off-grid mountain bunker. When the code is eventually found, Dillinger sends his AI humanoid, along with another assassin program named Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) to hunt Eve down and retrieve it at all costs — whoever finds the code, after all, will be at the forefront of a new era of technological advancement.
Arresting visuals, a swift pace and a thumping Nine Inch Nails soundtrack is enough to keep Disney’s soft reboot of the eighties sci-fi cult classic on the rails for a good bit longer than expected. By-and-large, it’s a suitably mesmerising update of the material with a strong central performance from Greta Lee — until an extended detour into nostalgia-baiting nearly sends TRON: Ares off a cliff.
So begins a chase film pleasantly reminiscent of The Terminator, in which Eve is pursued by these regenerating warriors, proving unexpectedly resourceful and determined to survive. Meanwhile, Ares’ programming is glitching out — he’s starting to find flaws in the logic and demands of his boyish creator, and even worse, he’s discovering what it’s like to feel. A TRON film is incredibly dependent on its visual sensibility, so it’s odd that Ares takes place as much in our world as the digital one. It means a lot of sequences lack that startling artificial stimulation of the earlier TRON offerings, with the film’s highlights still taking place within the digital world. Regardless, the first half of the film is largely successful, even gripping — at the helm is journeyman Joachim Rønning, whose credits are not particularly inspiring (a Maleficent sequel and a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel post-Gore Verbinski, for example), but who keeps the action pumping steadily. He’s aided by an insistent score from Nine Inch Nails — much like Daft Punk’s work in TRON: Legacy, the soundtrack is such a highlight as to feel like a work that must be considered separately to the film to which it is adjoined. NIN fans may come away slightly disappointed — this is the band working firmly in the realm of Reznor’s decade-defining work on The Social Network, rather than the grimy industrial depths of the band’s most iconic output. For a cartoonish Disney property, though, it’s positively enthralling. Much of the cast acquit themselves well, too — the star of the show is Lee, who emerges ever-further into megawatt territory, giving good Sarah Connor as our lead human. Elsewhere, Peters and an under-utilised Gillian Anderson as mother-son Dillingers are appropriately menacing and slimy, while Turner-Smith is icy severity personified as Ares’ attack-dog. Even Leto fits smoothly into the simulation — his odd brand of anti-performance is a good fit for an artificial intelligence slowly coming to consciousness, never quite gelling into either world he’s placed in.
It’s a shame a more stridently individualistic director was not at the helm of TRON: Ares (or even the last installment’s very decent journeyman, Top Gun Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski) as they may have better handled the inevitable, trademark Disney slide into cheap nostalgia-bait that this new film indulges in come the film’s back-half. It’s apt to compare these sequences of TRON: Ares, in which Ares is sent into Flynn’s original, 1980s-coded virtual world, to the likes of painful IP hatchet-jobs like The Rise of Skywalker or the new Ghostbusters films. For a series ostensibly obsessed with looking to the future, the film’s contentment to sink comfortably backward represents a low-point, disappointingly neutering the promising material of the film’s earlier acts. It’s not helped by the film’s muddled, inconsistent generation of ideas pertaining to the state of modern artificial intelligence. TRON: Ares can’t decide whether it is pro- or anti-AI, settling uncomfortably somewhere in the middle, landing on a ‘good guy with a gun’ ideology about how we approach this new technical frontier. The film’s most compelling, salient idea is summed up by Julian in presenting his creation to shareholders: ‘the car is already being built. What matters is who is holding the keys’. It’s a prescient glimpse inside the minds of our manchild tech overlords, raised on science fictions warning us of overreaching when playing god and taking all the wrong lessons from them. To these tech titans, if they’re not the ones creating the systems that are systematically destroying the planet, the human creative engine, and our social fabric, then someone else will. It’s a theory of mutually assured destruction that TRON: Ares is woefully unequipped to discuss, asking us to believe that benevolence is a mode tech autocrats and artificial beings alike can exhibit, contrary to everything we know about them. For all its futuristic elan, the original Tron was a marvel of hand-made effects, its distinct visual style the result of painstaking human craft — an aspect that lends the property an air of sincerity that preserves Tron’s childlike wonder at new frontiers to be found. TRON: Ares has ambition and optimism aplenty, but winds up too-often pointing those aspects in the wrong direction.
TRON: Ares is in cinemas now.