‘Tron: Ares’ Review: What Kind of Legacy Is This? [C+]

As the world marches ever forward into an AI and virtual reality-driven era—one tech moguls and corporations desperately seek to define on their own terms so civilians experience their particular brand of real-life simulacrum—it’s hard not to think a new Tron movie feels rather timely. Then again, with that inevitable trudge of technological progress, Tron has the benefit of always feeling timely. It was true in 1982, in 2010 with Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy, and now Tron: Ares aims to build a blockbuster sci-fi action movie about the computerized world of the Grid in a new reality constantly under threat of being subsumed into cyberspace.

The immediacy of the environment into which Tron: Ares is being released is perhaps why it feels so limp as a movie that inherently has to wrestle with such big ideas. Despite its subject matter, Ares is content to pay only brief lip service to the ethical dilemmas surrounding the intrusion of AI into our lives and our art. If you’re particularly cynical, you could even read the movie as an implicit endorsement of the moral potential—and even the goodness—of artificial intelligence, as we follow the title character Ares (Jared Leto), a Grid-based computer program initially sent on hostile missions by the nefarious Dillinger corporation who gradually comes to understand human nature and becomes something of a hero in the process.

But even Kosinski’s refreshingly sleek Legacy didn’t concern itself much with confronting our most pressing social-tech issues. It was content to be a story about legacy and fathers and sons, set against the glowing luminescence of an upgraded digital environment, with Light Cycle battles and chases across computerized landscapes taking on a new sensorial flavor through then-modern VFX. Ares follows in the same vein, but the effects aren’t the novelty they once were; hell, the movie even spends ten minutes in the blockier-looking Grid of ’80s Tron just to offer some additional flavor, and to give Jeff Bridges a requisite couple minutes of screen time. Even so, Ares mostly seeks to impress through a flurry of neon-red light bands streaking across the screen for 120 minutes, with a thumping industrial-techno Nine Inch Nails score keeping things alive.

The thing is, both of those elements are occasionally impressive—the cool luminous glow that typically defines a Tron action sequence is given room to shine through some fairly solid action filmmaking set to a constantly throbbing beat. If this were any other movie—say, a spy film where a motorbike chase through the city didn’t include radiant streaks of burning red light—the whole thing might come off as aggressively humdrum in its competence. Indeed, Ares gets an implicit boost from the glossy visualizations that accompany its world, and from the work of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who help carry the movie on the backs of their aural pleasures.

It’s the clunky script and the film’s overall failure to realize any potential that holds Ares back. The idea of a Disney sequel that plays it safe and lands awkwardly is familiar territory for director Joachim Rønning, whose previous work includes the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean entry, Dead Men Tell No Tales, as well as Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. Teaming up with Eragon scribe Jesse Wigutow doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, and as a result Ares feels like the unpolished product of filmmakers accustomed to slumming it in the dregs of corporate studio profit mills.

Tron: Ares isn’t as terrible as that sounds, it’s just not particularly good either. At the very least, it boasts a compelling lead in Greta Lee as Eve Kim, the current CEO of ENCOM following the disappearance of Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund). Her main goal, once she locates the much sought-after Permanence Code—which allows digital entities to exist in the real world for longer than mere minutes—is to keep it out of the hands of Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), her corporate rival bent on weaponizing the Grid’s assets. Lee is an unexpected face to see headlining a blockbuster like this, but she fills in the gaps within the broad strokes of Kim’s characterization, making the most of a role largely defined by her proximity to the film’s more indomitable computer programs. She does get her chance to send a cycle flying into the face of one of Dillinger’s goons, the relentless Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), but she’s mostly relegated to running for safety while the computers duke it out.

To that end, Leto is better here than you might expect from Hollywood’s resident obnoxious guy nobody really likes seeing these days—perhaps because he’s mostly playing a blank slate, with little room for his usual assortment of odd tics. Even as the script starts to get a little too cute and quippy with his dialogue while he acclimates to the human world, the emotional stasis of Ares as a character keeps Leto at a welcome remove. As for Peters, it’s hard to tell whether he’s unsure what to do with Dillinger or if the script itself can’t decide what zone it wants him to exist in, stuck somewhere between ruthless sci-fi villain and arch caricature of corrupt corporate figureheads who are, at heart, petulant little boys, a dynamic underscored by Peters’ scenes with his mother, Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson), when he must answer for his screw-ups.

Ares admittedly has some conceptual juice flowing between these various players and plot threads. Since Dillinger can only spawn Ares and Athena for half an hour at a time, the beginning of the movie finds them racing against the clock to accomplish their directives—corporate espionage missions refracted through a virtual reality–based sci-fi lens. Some of the genre’s familiar cyber-thriller and hacker tropes are given a clever, winking spin: something as commonplace as “hacking into the mainframe” now plays out as an organized team of Grid agents pulling off a physical heist. But the problem isn’t that Tron: Ares lacks any good ideas—it’s that it doesn’t know what to do with the stray threads it tugs at. By the back half, we’re down to the most uninspired impulses of studio filmmaking, complete with a character who exists purely to spout non-joke wisecracks (Arturo Castro as Eve’s friend Seth) and a climax that visually resembles every Marvel movie featuring some giant piece of floating machinery threatening the streets of New York. Tron will always have its dazzling baubles to ooh and aah at, but at the end of the day, Ares feels much like the AI tech companies keep insisting on shoving down our throats: technically impressive, but also frivolous and empty.

Grade: C+

Walt Disney Pictures will release Tron: Ares only in theaters on October 10.