PLOT: Dillinger (Evan Peters), a nefarious tech genius, discovers a way to bring AI programs from The Grid into the real world—with the caveat that they can only exist for twenty-nine minutes before vanishing. When a rival CEO, Eve (Greta Lee), discovers the key to making programs from The Grid exist permanently in the real world, Dillinger sends his security program, Ares (Jared Leto), to recover the data and eliminate her. But being in the real world changes Ares, as he develops compassion and a desire to be human.
REVIEW: Tron is a film series that always should have been a bigger deal for Disney. After all, the premise is great: computer programs existing in a virtual world designed by Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) have their own personalities, souls, and reality. As we move deeper into an AI-dominated future, the movies have become even more relevant—but oddly, no director has ever truly nailed the franchise. Don’t get me wrong: all of the existing movies are good in their own way. The first Tron was boundary-breaking and remains the most successful creatively, while Tron: Legacy was gorgeous to look at but fell a bit flat in terms of story and character (both were just reissued in gorgeous 4K transfers).
Tron: Ares is an improvement in some ways, giving us the most compelling character from The Grid since the original film. It’s the first time a movie in the series has featured a program as the protagonist, and Ares is a unique hero—with Jared Leto being unexpectedly perfect casting. There’s always been something enigmatic (and, dare I say, strange) about Leto, which has perhaps prevented him from ever truly catching on as a leading man. Yet that quality makes him perfect as the robotic Ares—the Grid’s version of Pinocchio—a program designed to eliminate others who develops compassion after coming into contact with humanity, specifically through the film’s secondary protagonist, Eve (Greta Lee).
Usually, a character like Eve would be the lead, following her journey into The Grid (like Flynn in the original and Sam—played by Garrett Hedlund—in the sequel). While some of that happens here, the novelty is that the makers of Tron: Ares flipped the script. Instead of humans entering The Grid, it’s programs entering the real world. Leto plays Ares with a growing sense of humanity and fun, as he becomes attuned to the simple pleasures of being human—including, in a great nod, the music of Depeche Mode.
Yet while Ares is a great character to build the film around, this new Tron still suffers from some of the same issues that Legacy did. For one thing, the first half hour or so of the movie is deadly slow. It takes too long for Ares to become the center of the plot, and Greta Lee—so strong in the indie drama Past Lives—isn’t given much to work with early on. She’s saddled with too much tech talk and clunky comic relief. She fares much better once the action starts, with the film suddenly clicking into high gear during a motorcycle chase involving Lightcycles in the real world.
From that point on, Tron: Ares is a lot of fun. Leto and Lee have easygoing chemistry once the action begins, and visually the film is a stunner. Director Joachim Rønning made a smart choice hiring Jeff Cronenweth, who shot many of David Fincher’s classics, to be the DP. He gives the movie a slick, moody look, with the format expanding to IMAX aspect ratio anytime characters enter The Grid. The VFX are spectacular, and the score by Nine Inch Nails is an instant classic, incorporating several nods to Wendy Carlos’s seminal score for the first film during a delightfully retro segment.
However, the human drama—basically anything that doesn’t involve Ares—falls flat. Evan Peters plays the younger Dillinger (the same character briefly played by Cillian Murphy in Tron: Legacy) and is too over-the-top evil; it’s hard to believe he could ever ascend to being a CEO given how psychotic he comes off. Gillian Anderson fares better as his mother—cold and calculating, but believable as the kind of villain a movie like this needs. Jeff Bridges doesn’t get much to do either, and his return as Kevin Flynn feels like an afterthought. The film also shows signs of post-production tinkering: Cameron Monaghan (Shameless) has a brief walk-on role despite having been central enough to earlier versions of the movie that he helped promote it at Comic-Con.
Outside of Leto, the only performer who really makes an impression is Jodie Turner-Smith, who delivers a terrific turn as Athena, Ares’s rival on The Grid. With her bleached-blonde hair and distinct presence, she’s picture-perfect in the part and provides the menace lacking in Peters’s performance.
As with Tron: Legacy, Ares is a mixed bag, but once the action kicks in and the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack goes into overdrive, I found myself having a great time. While a truly great Tron movie has yet to be made (I love the original, but I wouldn’t call it great), Tron: Ares is still an entertaining return to The Grid.
