This year’s movie Tron: Ares will invert the 43-year-old franchise, which has explored the inner workings of computers and video games through a sci-fi lens. Unlike the original 1982 Tron and 2010’s Tron: Legacy, which sent human beings (“users”) into the digital world of programs, Ares will bring programs to the physical realm — and unleash their Recognizers and light cycles on the real world.
For Steven Lisberger, creator and director of the original Tron, the new sequel is another opportunity to use the franchise’s fantastical conceit to tell a metaphorical story. Amid the real-world growth (and growing threat) of artificial intelligence, Tron: Ares explores the dangers of humanity’s creations breaking the limitations of their original programming, and potentially dooming us all.
“To me, one of the main values of Tron — and it’s been true from the very beginning — is that it can be considered a metaphor for our world,” Lisberger told Polygon in a Zoom interview. “When one looks at Star Wars, one says, Oh, it’s the British versus the American rebels. I just got into this whole story that we were going to create an alternate world with alternate versions of ourselves. And what were those entities going to think of us having created them — the child to the parent?”
Since the beginning of Tron, Lisberger said, the franchise has been focused on “garbage in, garbage out, and looking into the void.” But the movies visualize those ideas in a way that’s appealing to kids and looks cool, the way we imagine a sleek, sexy cyberspace made physical would be.
“The deeper you look into the void, the more you reveal about yourself,” Lisberger said. “And this whole effort of creating cyberspace, creating AI is, in the end, probably going to reveal more about us than about technology. It’s really a form of mirror that we’re creating. And the question is: Is it going to be something that we utilize in a positive way?”
Tron: Ares, in theaters this October, follows Ares (Jared Leto) — a military computer program developed by hubristic tech bro Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) — as he ventures from the digital world into the real world to undertake a dangerous mission. Based on Ares’ first trailer, that mission has violent repercussions for the people of meatspace.
There were hints at Ares’ inversion of the journey between the real and digital worlds in Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy, which ends with Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) and the program Quorra (Olivia Wilde) escaping cyberspace together. But Lisberger said he had never really envisioned the programs of Tron achieving real-world sentience. He had other ideas in mind for sequels he pitched to Disney.
His big (unmade) idea for a Tron sequel? Warring search engines.
“I was pretty excited about search engines,” Lisberger said of his late-’90s/early-aughts pitches for Tron 2. He describes the concept of search engines as feeling “so cinematic, right out of scriptwriting,” even if they may seem straightforward and ubiquitous to us.
“You have something searching for a goal, and competing search engines. So I got into writing stories about that,” he said. “And then the other idea that I had eventually led to Tron: Legacy, which is what happened to Flynn [who] became a kind of Colonel Kurtz up the data stream. I emphasized the first one, the search engines, for quite some time, but that didn’t get much traction. And then I finally started bringing up the [Colonel Kurtz metaphor], and that got a lot of traction from the beginning.”
Lisberger is an executive producer and creative consultant on Tron: Ares, which is directed by Disney-sequel go-to Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) based on a screenplay by Jesse Wigutow (Daredevil: Born Again). But Lisberger recognizes that Ares is a film for a new generation of filmmakers tackling the Tron mythos, and seems more than happy to, well, get with the program.
“I didn’t have anybody in the back seat telling me where to go back in ’82, and it doesn’t feel right to me to be in the back seat telling this team where to go,” Lisberger said. “I’m there to help them make their film. They’re not there to help me make my film. And this is what they feel: They feel that this world that we created, that once was separate from us, has now merged with us.
“And I think that’s valid. [It addresses the] questions about Where is AI? How is it going to deal with us? Is it going to have any limitations? And if it does have limitations, who is going to impose those limitations? Who is going to contain the AI?”
But Tron: Ares lives within the theme of the original Tron, and in Lisberger’s ideas for Tron: Legacy, which is about limitations — and how both humans and their computer creations think of them.
“We live in a world where we have to recognize a lot of limitations on ourselves. Now we’re creating AI — an entity that potentially has no limitations. Do we really want to do that?” he said. “Do we want to have a version of ourselves and how we think with no limitations? This entity does not have these limitations, and we’re jealous of its ability to think, but perhaps the AI will be jealous of our physicality. Are we going to be the parent to the AI, or is the AI going to start treating us like children? One of us is going to have to be dominant.”
We’ll find out who wins when Tron: Ares comes to real-world movie theaters next month. The film stars Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Hasan Minhaj, Jodie Turner-Smith, Arturo Castro, Cameron Monaghan, Gillian Anderson, and Jeff Bridges, who reprises his role as Flynn.
Tron: Ares opens in theaters on Oct. 10.
