‘Tron: Ares’ review: Incoherent and incomprehensible

Joachim Rønning’s Tron: Ares is a shocking downgrade in visuals, plot, innovation, and all-around entertainment.

Tron: Ares sure makes it seem like Disney doesn’t know what to do with the Tron franchise. But in Tron: Ares‘s defense (this is the only time I will say that), Disney has never known what to do with Tron. Steven Lisberger’s original 1982 film earned a dedicated cult following and did fine at the box office, but didn’t reach the heights the studio needed during a period of financial strain. A sequel finally arrived in 2010 in the form of Joseph Kosinski‘s Tron: Legacy which, like its predecessor, earned a dedicated cult following but fell short of expectations despite doing fine at the box office. A direct sequel to that film was set to enter production in 2015, but was canned when Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland flopped at the box office and Disney decided to take a (momentary) step back from science-fiction. A few video games, comic books, and a star-studded animated series were all introduced along the way and then promptly abandoned.

Development restarted in 2017 with the focus changed to a supporting character from the unused Tron 3 script, set to be played by Jared Leto. That, too, promptly fell into development hell. But that was years ago, when Leto was just an actor who hadn’t given a good performance in years and also had a laundry list of sex abuse allegations. Now he’s an actor who hasn’t given a good performance in years, has a laundry list of sex abuse allegations, and is fresh off of several major box office catastrophes. Strike while the iron is hot!

Does not compute.

Tron: Ares focuses on Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who has been serving as CEO of ENCOM since Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund’s character in Tron: Legacy) disappeared shortly after the events of the previous film. ENCOM has stuck to designing video games, though that hasn’t stopped them from engaging in a fierce rivalry with Dillinger Systems, led by Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters). The daughter of Elisabeth Dillinger (Gillian Anderson) and grandson of Ed Dillinger (the late David Warner’s character from the original film), Julian wants to reverse the digitization technology from the first two films in order to create a physical AI army he can sell to the highest bidder, but his creations always dissolve after 29 minutes in the real world. Only Eve has the piece of code needed to make his army permanent, so lead security program Ares (Leto) is sent to get the code and eliminate Eve. But when Ares experiences rain for the first time and also reads one sentence from each chapter of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (really!), he decides he wants to be a real boy and teams up with her instead.

I cannot stress enough the extent to which I am cutting out the film’s stupidest parts in order to fit the basic story into a paragraph. Tron: Ares feels like someone squished together three different first drafts with no regard to what the end result would look like. This is at least thematically consistent for something where a character tries to frankenstein together meaning from a single sentence of each chapter of Frankenstein. But it’s incoherent at best and laughably ridiculous at worst.

Eve goes on a months-long global quest to track down a piece of information only to later reveal it was actually available a few steps outside her office the whole time. Why? Because the climax hit and the film realized it wrote itself into a corner when it gave its title character a 29-minute lifespan. Permanence means vulnerability and mortality when Ares needs a character arc, but unstoppable power when the programs still loyal to Julian need to feel like a threat. ENCOM employees scramble to build a MacGuffin that can save Ares, then stop because the production thought of a way to throw in another reference to one of the previous films. This leads to pivoting instead to building a separate MacGuffin that an earlier scene established they don’t actually need.

User error.

Leto hasn’t delivered a great performance in ages, so it’s only fitting that he’s here with all the charisma and unnerving eye contact of a potato that’s been left in the dirt too long. Sure, Leto’s abusive behavior is such a veritable open secret that some Hollywood A-listers felt comfortable publicly implying that he’s a pedophile. But Tron: Ares gives him a bold new direction; At one point, Leto looks at a woman who’s upset that he read her emails and texts, using what he learned there to try and gain her approval. If that seems creepy, he then tells her that she should be more grateful he didn’t just murder her instead. One can only wonder what attracted him to the role.

But Tron: Ares also features some incredibly talented supporting players who should’ve been able to elevate this into something at least passable. Alas, the script sees characters largely as a tool for explaining the plot. Lee tries to add depth to a woman fleeing for her life while still grieving the loss of her sister but has to deliver too much exposition for any of it to ever land. Peters clearly has the makings of a great villain, but instead spends the entire film screaming exposition at one of two touchscreens. Arturo Castro, Hasan Minhaj, and Sarah Desjardins try to bring some much-needed levity to things, but it’s hard to be lighthearted when they’re rapidly alternating between either delivering or listening to exposition. Also underserved: the dozen-plus different newscasters who show up to deliver exposition throughout the film.

Poor Anderson gets it worse than anyone. Nobody (nobody!) expected Disney to use the Tron franchise make a coherent point about AI. This is, after all, the studio that is so averse to politics that its executives recently told filmmakers to make an 11-year-old character more masculine so people wouldn’t think he was gay. But Tron: Ares somehow decided to tackle the most laughably on-the-nose political messaging this side of the God’s Not Dead franchise. And since this film wouldn’t know subtlety if Mary Shelley defined it in a sentence of a chapter of her hit book Frankenstein, most of this political messaging is delivered via Anderson looking slightly off camera and just saying it outright.

The AI of it all.

Disney wouldn’t have the guts to call out the negative impact of plagiarist AI programs on art even though they’re currently fighting multiple lawsuits over it. Nor would they dare acknowledge that major AI proponents like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Vice President JD Vance talk about AI in a way that reminds us that they’re also proponents of a white supremacist blogger who thinks that businesses should eliminate democracy and replace the government with militarized corporate states, despite this being a movie that is literally all about AI being used for political violence.

No, Tron: Ares opts for “AI sure is super awesome but what if we aren’t able to control it?” The most milquetoast of AI opinions! But one that could have worked with something like a naive inventor who doesn’t notice his creation evolving beyond him (as seen in several film adaptation of Frankenstein). Instead, Anderson’s character watches her son actively attempt murder and commit felonies then lectures him on how he’s lost his mind… for thinking he’ll be able to control AI forever. An actor of her caliber deserves so much more.

The only actor who manages to stand out from within the confines of this script is Jodie Turner-Smith, who plays Ares’ lieutenant-turned-antagonist Athena. The script is so focused on making her tough and scary that it neglects to give her lengthy bouts of exposition, instead relying on Schwarzenegger-esque one-liners. It opens up the character enough that Turner-Smith is able to bring some real gravitas to the role, at least until the climax when she needs to explain Ares’ character arc.

Bad graphics.

“But wait,” you say. “Haven’t all of the Tron films had some story issues? Don’t most people love the series for its groundbreaking visuals?” That’s a great point, Person I Just Made Up. Tron: Ares disappoints on that front, too. The bulk of the film taking place in the physical world means that characters and settings can’t be nearly as interesting as we’ve come to expect from the digital world of the first two films, which comes with the territory. But returning elements are lousy, too.

The franchise’s iconic lightcycles now look like your brother-in-law’s motorcycle punctuated with generic neon LEDs and the AI characters’ design is even less exciting, often showing a few flashes of color before settling into dull black and gray tones. Meanwhile, the various digital locales the characters visit look interesting so long as characters are standing still and saying exposition at one another but devolve into mush as soon as anyone starts to move. Elements that are supposedly grand in scale are too bland and featureless to carry meaningful weight. Director Joachim Rønning is abandoning theatrical spectacle in favor of something ready to be cut into 45-second video montages.

The only real visual highlight is when the film takes a brief detour to the original Grid of the 1982 film. This primarily happens to shoehorn in Jeff Bridges’ cameo, which lasts for a single scene despite being a fixture of the film’s marketing. But simply leaning on the visuals of another more interesting film manages to create some nice moments. That said, even this still still never manages to look quite as good as that first film despite Tron having come out a whopping 43 years ago. Since then we’ve gotten two Avatar films, hundreds of hours of Marvel and Star Wars, The Fall, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Love Witch, and the entirety of Wes Anderson‘s career. Where are the incredible digital advancements that Tron: Ares keeps talking about?

The bottom line.

The only area where Tron: Ares manages to come anywhere near to legacy of its predecessors is in its music. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails don’t hit quite as many highs as Daft Punk or the incomparable Wendy Carlos, but they come pretty close. Their consistently satisfying score manages the only oomph this film has to offer. But that score was just as satisfying, maybe even more so, when the film ended and the credits began to roll. Those that are the most excited about the Tron: Ares soundtrack have probably already streamed it, and there’s zero reason for them to seek out anything more.

Everything else is better off being left on a hard drive.

Tron: Ares is now playing in theaters everywhere. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures. Read more articles by Brogan Luke Bouwhuis here.