Tron: Ares Review
Sort of like mid-2000’s sci-fi films of the ilk of Total Recall or the Robocop reboots; fine, pretty, but completely forgettable.
Rival tech billionaires Eve Kim (Greta Lee) and Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) race each other to find the mythical Permanence Code, that allows them to bring digital items to life in the real world for longer than the current time limit of 29 minutes. But when Eve finds it, Dillinger turns to his digital security program Ares (Jared Leto) - sending him into the real world to hunt Eve down and get the code before she can use it.
Tron: Ares comes way too long after the last film in the now trilogy, and amidst the deafening fanfare of literally nobody in the world asking for this. Initial box office numbers are low, on a grossly inflated budget, and while many pundits will wonder why, the answer is fairly obvious; nobody cares about nor wants another Tron movie.
Particularly not one that zooms in on the most banal and disinteresting points of its story. There’s plenty of interesting threads alluded to here, but all of them are shunted aside in service of a big (logically impossible) ship floating in and a hand-to-hand battle, with our tech guru coder lead being reduced to running through the streets or racing bikes rather than doing what she’s good at.
At an even broader level, while there would be interesting things to touch on regarding bringing the digital sentries into the real world, the act of doing so completely destroys the metaphor of Tron. This makes scenes like Julian Dillinger typing out dialogue for his face to say in the grid, or Ares and his squad of militaristic security people running across the steps of a digital security server in the grid, seem completely laughable; because there’s no longer the suspended disbelief of ‘this is a representation of an idea’ - it’s been replaced with ‘this is what is really happening’.
The visuals across the board are pretty nice, and certainly serviceable. Cinematography is fine, and the CGI is OK as well, but nothing stands out as remarkable or inventive. Similarly, the story is barely there - it does enough to keep the plot chugging, but deftly avoids anything of actual interest or concern. Greta Lee brings little to no emotion or electricity to her performance, and while Leto is good (his naturally robotic tones help him slip into this android like performance), there isn’t a performance that really sucks you in and makes this believable.
Ultimately, that makes for a relatively inoffensive film. Certainly, one you won’t have a hard time ingesting. But also one you certainly didn’t need, and likely won’t recall.
