It is hard to think of a sci-fi franchise more visually and thematically singular than Tron. Born out of the techno-optimism of the 80s, the original film Tron (1982) imagined a world in which humans could step into the world of code as digitized beings on the "grid", a place where computer programs live, fight and die, and where humans may even get trapped. Tron's signature action sequence is the "lightcycle" fight in the grid, in which programs fight to the death on sleek neon-accented sports bikes that trail ribbons of deadly light. Tron: Ares is a technical upgrade on its predecessors on all fronts, but ironically it also stands apart less from the new wave of films with AI characters.
That may well be not because the franchise has fallen behind but that the world has caught up to it. In the 1980s it was radical to anthropomorphize computer programs, but the dawn of generative AI today has made human-like code an everyday reality. When Tron: Ares introduces a steely-eyed, diving-suit-wearing Jared Leto as an advanced AI named Ares, our immediate reaction is one of vague familiarity.
Ares' creator, Julian Dillinger (Peter Evans), grandson of the franchise's original antagonist Ed Dillinger, pitches the AI to his board as a way create an army of endlessly-replaceable superintelligent soldiers thanks to a new breakthrough technology of transporting digital artifacts into the real world. Only problem being that these digital artifacts don't last longer than a half-hour. While the CEO of ENCOM, and Dillinger's rival, the brilliant Eve Kim (Greta Lee), is after the Permanence Code that will let these digital artifacts exist in the real world forever, Dillinger, following the steps of his amoral grandad, tries to steal it from her.
Compared to the soulless Tron: Legacy, this film tries to inject emotionality, if only half-heartedly through weary clichés of female-coded characters. Gillian Andersen, for instance, plays Julian's exacerbated mother Elisabeth, showing up at regular intervals to nod disapprovingly at her son's schemes, or slap him across his face and say "I told you so" as he invariably unleashes chaos over downtown through a powerful AI program called Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith). The catalyst for Eve's pursuit of Permanence Code being the death of her younger sister feels also like a weak attempt at character building.
Although the writing doesn't do them justice, the grand ideas are there. Elisabeth implores her son to realize that changing the world can just as easily mean burning it to the ground - a not-so-veiled comment on today's overreaching tech empires and their god-complex-inducing mission statements. When Athena follows Julian's instructions to a macabre degree, it is clearly a nod to the famed AI Alignment problem.
The film builds only marginally on the obsidians-and-lasers visual aesthetic of its predecessor, Joseph Kosinski's Tron: Legacy - it is its plot that allows it to mature to a more thrilling degree. AIs like Ares and Athena pop in and out of the real world, bringing with them fabulous digital paraphernalia, which are 3D printed by lasers that sway like nightclub lights. What truly transports film's action scenes, though, and in fact the film as a whole, to vertiginous heights of trippy fun is Trent Reznor's and Atticus Ross's (of "Challengers" fame) kinetic EDM score that deserves to be studied at film schools.
Just as Reznor and Ross may have been the only names on the list of worthy composers for Tron, Leto is a natural choice for Ares, with its evolving understanding of what it means to be an AI. Leto's impenetrably cold eyes soften as his AI avatar becomes Eve's unlikely ally, although he maintains an air of mystery about his intentions in a way that adds layers to this otherwise simplistic character.
Greta Lee is less successful in showing intrigue. We don't buy it when Eve Kim cryptically says to Ares that she is maybe not to be trusted - she seems rather eager to help him out, needlessly so. Lee also looks painfully out-of-step in the action scenes and lacks the gravitas to play the mysterious, maverick CEO of a popular tech company that Eve Kim is made out to be. An even more bewildering casting choice is comedian Hasan Minhaj as the CTO of ENCOM who looks as convincing as you might imagine, banging out world-saving lines of code.
In ways good and bad, Tron: Ares continues in the tradition of a Tron film: audio-visually sumptuous but floundering in its narrative. At some point, Tron: Ares starts to resemble a superhero film in which villains come down from up high in their spaceships and engage in downtown battles between city's skyscrapers. At least ideologically, the franchise is becoming more interesting in its stubborn techno-optimism - a hard stance to defend these days, but one that, in the hands of a stronger writer, could make for a truly compelling sequel.