“I wonder how many people under the age of 25 have heard of Mozart.”
—Software engineer Kevin Flynn, in TRON: Ares
If you want to see a textbook example of missed opportunity, look no further than this highly nostalgic, largely pointless exercise in franchise resurrection. Visually, it dazzles. Narratively, it fizzles.
When the original Tron (without capital letters) appeared back in 1982, it had cult classic written all over it. The dialogue may have been generic, but the larger concept revealed a wealth of imagination. It had vivid, neon-drenched set pieces and state-of-the art computer animation. In its melding of human and digital “reality,” it looked decades into the future. Now, nearly fifty years later, here we are, immersed in a digital world, wondering where all of that cinematic promise went. Apparently it got lost in the grids.
This time around, Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club, Suicide Squad) portrays Ares, a hyper-intelligent program created by Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters of American Horror Story), the grandson of the unprincipled tech executive in the first film. Eve Kim, played by Greta Lee (Past Lives, The Morning Show), has become the Chief Executive Officer of ENCOM, following in the ethical footsteps of the software corporation’s previous lead programmer and video game developer, Kevin Flynn. They and their allies engage in a lively pursuit of the “permanence code,” hoping to gain control of the means of integrating digital constructs into the real world.
Sentiment complicates the narrative equation. Elisabeth Dillinger (Gillian Anderson), Julian’s mother and head of Dillinger Systems, makes a fateful decision to oppose her son’s untethered ambition, while Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) serves as his single-minded (or -programmed) enforcer. Ares, otherwise known as “Master Control,” begins to recognize and demonstrate empathy, while Eve grapples with the memory of her late sister, who worked on humanitarian projects before cancer claimed her life. Yes, this sounds promising as a functional story line for Norwegian director Joachim Ronning (Kon-Tiki, Pirates of the Caribbean).
You can add to that all of the nostalgic elements. The voice of David Warner, the seminal Master Control Program from 1982, appears as archival audio. Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde, the Sam Flynn and algorithm Quorra from 2010’s Tron: Legacy, return through archival photographs. Jeff Bridges reprises his role as Kevin Flynn, philosophizing about Artificial Intelligence and its prospects for humankind. Hence, the amusing discussion of Mozart versus Depeche Mode.
Unfortunately, the movie quickly devolves into a flashy, uncommonly loud, gratuitous series of battle-like scenes, with the ideas (both old and new) as the casualties. The plot retains its identity discs, but the picture has lost its identity. The zeitgeist goes unexplored in the world of 2025.
That’s not to say that the picture is totally unimpressive. It respects the Tron franchise in its artistic design and color palette, highlighted by red and black. Characters flash across the screen, leaving trails of light and energy. The animatronics and 3-D composites consistently occupy the eye.
Alas, composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, deserving Academy Award winners for The Social Network and Soul, contribute a score best described as relentless. The music is bombastic, and the sound mix is unforgiving. (By contrast, their score for the upcoming Luca Guadagnino picture, After the Hunt, is far more nuanced and compelling.) If you keep a close watch, though, you can see their cameos as fighter pilots.
This Disney project has been fifteen years in the making, renewing a franchise spawned in the 1980s. “In a nutshell,” to borrow a recurring phrase from Ares, this had great potential. AI has arrived, after all, in a major way. It has sparked intense debate about its uses and potential abuses, including its integration into the cinematic process itself. The title character even exhibits self-awareness here, insisting that “Our directive is our programming, not our purpose. That has yet to be determined.” Tron: Ares fails to provide an answer, or even a reasonable clue.
