Over the course of its history, the Walt Disney Company has turned its hit movies into popular theme-park rides, and vice-versa. With TRON: Ares, they’ve made a movie that is, simply, a ride. Viewers are encouraged to see this empty but transportive cinematic experience on the biggest screen with the loudest volume, in 3D if possible, for the full E-ticket experience.
This TRON franchise entry checks all the boxes of a legacy sequel, looping through past installments and setting up future ones. It doesn’t take the big swings of 2010’s TRON: Legacy, but it honors both that film and the 1982 original by finding a new spin on the idea of life inside a computer — namely, what if those walking, talking “programs” could emerge into our world with their light-cycles and other cool paraphernalia?
From the opening moments, director Joachim Rønning (Young Woman and the Sea) signals that he’s going to be as shameless about 3D as any 1950s showman, turning a montage of exposition into a loop-de-loop trip through cyberspace. We learn that there are two rival tech companies: ENCOM, founded by the long-missing Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and now run by Eve Kim (Greta Lee), and Dillinger Corporation, whose bratty CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) struggles to fill the shoes of his mother (Gillian Anderson) and grandfather (David Warner) before him.
Inspired by the ideals of her late sister, Eve dreams of moving ENCOM past simply making video games and into using AI to cure disease and solve world hunger; Julian just wants to get military contracts by bringing super-soldiers like Ares (Jared Leto) out of the computer and into reality. (The process of doing so looks a lot like 3D printing.) The moguls can’t reach their goal without finding a McGuffin created by Flynn, known as the Permanence Code, since neither Eve’s tech-crops nor Julian’s digital soldiers can exist in our world for more than 29 minutes without it.
Eve finds it, and Julian wants it, so he sends programs Ares and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) after her to get it, and many pursuits ensue, whether inside the computer or out on the city streets where light cycles and other TRON tech-weapons cause chaos. Complicating matters is the fact that Ares has developed a soul, evolving from a mere computer program to a human being; the film shouts out Frankenstein, but Leto’s stiff performance calls to mind other spiritual antecedents, from the android protagonists of Robot Monster (“To live like the hu-man! To laugh! Feel! Want!”) and Short Circuit to the sentient bomb in John Carpenter’s Dark Star.
While the film’s glossy surfaces (from production designer Darren Gilford and acclaimed cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth), breathless chases (edited by Tyler Nelson, The Batman), and throbbing score (Nine Inch Nails creates a sound distinct from earlier scores by Wendy Carlos and Daft Punk, but no less effective) do the heavy lifting of TRON: Ares, Lee and Turner-Smith manage not to get drowned out by the synthetic atmosphere. Lee’s progressive, high-minded tech CEO may be pure fantasy — Silicon Valley is more likely to give us an endless stream of mewling Julians — but the actor gives the character a vitality and depth that transcends the razzle-dazzle. For her part, Turner-Smith makes quite the formidable villain, but an empathetic one; as a computer program created by Julian, she is literally just following orders, even if those orders lead to a bleaker situation than her creator could ever have imagined.
TRON: Ares throws in a few half-baked ideas about ethics in the tech world, but its main agenda is to be big, loud, fast, and eye-popping, and on that level — and only that level — it’s a complete success.
Director: Joachim Rønning
Screenwriter: Jesse Wigutow, story by David DiGilio and Jesse Wigutow, based on characters created by Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird.
Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Cameron Monaghan, Gillian Anderson, Jeff Bridges
Producers: Sean Bailey, Jared Leto, Emma Ludbrook, Jeffrey Silver, Justin Springer, Steven Lisberger
Executive producers: Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, Russell Allen, Joseph Kosinski
Cinematographer: Jeff Cronenweth
Production design: Darren Gilford
Editing: Tyler Nelson
Music: Nine Inch Nails
Sound design: Tormod Ringnes, supervising sound editor / re-recording mixer / sound designer
Production companies: Walt Disney Studios
In English
119 minutes
