Try as they might, Disney’s never been able to recreate the secret sauce that made Tron so appetizing to a generation of nerdy kids at the start of the PC era. Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy came close in spirit and style, but it was missing that certain je ne sais quoi that relegated it to the status of “cult film” rather than the next-generation tentpole franchise that the pre-Marvel, pre-Lucasfilm, pre-Fox Disney was so desperately hoping for. Joachim Ronning’s Tron: Ares gives up on making the franchise’s central conceit work — the whole point of the series being “Man, being inside a computer would be something crazy, huh?” — and instead focuses on Jared Leto’s after-colon eponymous lead and his misadventures trying to live longer than a half-hour in the real world. That’s right: this is a Tron movie that thinks its audience wants to see its story unfold on the streets of San Francisco rather than the fluorescent world of cyberspace. If there were a value proposition in any other industry as dead-on-arrival as this one is, it most likely wouldn’t have made it past the conceptual stages. This isn’t just a hardware or software failure. It’s the Juicero; if the device had wanted to pen garbage thought-leadership op-eds in addition to serving store-bought juice from a squeezable bag, now available with red LED accents, a perfect pairing with a racing-style gamer chair, and those light-up tiles streamers put on their walls if they don’t have a green screen yet.
Much like Poochie, Legacy’s protagonists, Sam Flynn and Quorra, did the software exec equivalent of “dying on the way back to their planet” in the interim between films. They went off the grid, leaving Encom, the software company created by Kevin (Jeff Bridges), tech-Jesus, and Sam’s dad, in the hands of Eve Kim (Greta Lee) and her sister. The latter died some time before the film starts, and, after righting the Encom ship, Eve dedicated herself to finishing her work — and Kevin’s — by tracking down “the permanence code,” which allows for objects printed from cyberspace to endure in the real world. It’s a revolutionary technology, and her main rival, Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), needs it. He begins the film by defrauding the board of Dillinger Systems, of which he is the CEO, by printing up a battle tank and claiming he’s cracked the code — only for the massive vehicle to collapse right after they leave. That includes the driver, the next-generation soldier Ares (Jared Leto), who struggles with his half-hour time limit and his purpose in life.
One could dismissively refer to him as Pinocchio (and they do), but he’s self-styled as Frankenstein’s monster, complete with gratuitous Shelley quotations.* Ares presides over Dillinger’s red-shaded equivalent of Encom’s “grid,” though we don’t get to see as much of it as Kosinski showed us of theirs. He gets his marching orders from the CEO via giant holographic face, and as the “Master Control Program” — raise your hand if you can’t remember the bad guy from the first Tron either — he has a certain amount of leeway in his programming. So, when he’s preparing to be sent into the real world to kidnap Eve, he learns everything he can about her and, of course, falls in love. He’s a sensitive soul, a Depeche Mode fan** with an alien affect, and, when ordered to extract the code in a way that might kill her, he winds up breaking all the rules to free Eve and abscond with her into the real world in search of some other way to achieve “permanence.” Over the objections of his mom (Gillian Anderson, mainly here to give looks of haughty disapproval), Dillinger sends Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), his second-program-in-command, to track them down.
What follows destroys some of San Francisco in the film, unleashes a potential grey-goo apocalypse in the unconsidered implications of its storytelling, and teases a sequel with a mid-credits sequence that will likely never amount to anything unless this makes half a billion. It’s all very dull, with the attempts at “awe” offset by varying levels of VFX quality and the Mouse’s budget-friendly dictate that this has to be set at street-level and mostly at night. Unlike Kosinski, who had more high-flying ambitions than to spend his career in the Disney trenches, Ronning is a company man through and through, who has stayed with them through thick and thin after heading over from Norway. He’s one of their go-to big-budget sequel guys for mid-tier “original” live-action IP (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and this), though he took some time off and directed Daisy Ridley in Young Woman and the Sea before this one. There’s something to be said for that, though, taking direction while directing. It’s a bit surprising he hasn’t done a Marvel feature yet, given that he could probably deliver a made-to-spec Combo Man movie that would pass as solid in-flight entertainment. As conceptually flawed as it is, he’s made good choices in execution, with David Fincher’s longtime cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth behind the lens and Nine Inch Nails taking over score duties from Daft Punk.*** It just can’t overcome that it’s not a particularly good Tron movie.
Now, none of the Tron films are what most would consider to be “good” movies, but the last two were interesting, which is often richer and more rewarding than “good.” Steven Lisberger’s original feature was, shockingly, successful at the box office, coming at the tail end of audience tolerance for the truly strange era of New Wave science fiction. Unlike some of its antecedents like Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running or Gary Nelson’s The Black Hole, it was explicitly inclusive to an all-ages audience**** but didn’t skimp out on the weird. Its bizarre nature — the slowness, the aged visual effects, the vivid colors against a black backdrop — gives it an alien, otherworldly quality that remains compelling to this day, even if rewatching it will truly test one’s patience. Legacy struck this chord and attempted to modernize it, though it reflects the era’s tastes in its own way (bringing Pixar in to do rewrites instead of eliminating dialogue where possible, and so on). It’s genuinely impressive, especially as a first feature, even if it’s, well, dull when not engaged in action and relies on particularly bad de-aging technology for a major character. All of the movies assume we care about corporate shenanigans, which is its most cyberpunk-y feature outside of cyberspace, even though we don’t. The sequels assume we’re Tron Guy and can quote the original chapter-and-verse, but only Ares has the gall to assume we want to see lightcycles in the real world and totally neglects the digital in favor of meatspace. There’s nothing weird or compelling here, which is, in essence, reflective of its own era.
This series has a knack for acting as a watermark for the tech tide, and Ares’ failure says as much about our relationship with the digital landscape as the others did. The original was full of strange possibilities, especially in its look, anticipating (and shaping) early internet/computing aesthetics that were unique and era-defining. The computer world was something new, a break with the organic styles that came before it: impersonal, unexplored, an “undiscovered country” primed for discovery. The sequel premiered at what may be, in retrospect, Silicon Valley’s apex: With the smartphone, “eternal September” took over every page on the calendar, and “digital life” didn’t quite seem like a foreign concept anymore. New technologies and companies were genuinely disruptive, and we were primed for further integration of this technology in daily life, even if the cracks were starting to show (The Social Network came out right around the same time). Though Big Tech’s conquest was laying waste to the old internet — the small communities of enthusiasts of all stripes —the fun hadn’t totally disappeared yet. This era didn’t seem like it’d ever end, and unless you were hit by a video-pivot and lost a job, you mainly reaped the rewards of delivery-on-demand and endless entertainment. Hell, if you were, you could always just learn to code.
Today, though, the dream is practically over and enshittification reigns. The companies themselves have never been more powerful — the Magnificent Seven essentially hold up the entire stock market, and tech CEOs have only gotten closer with the powers that were in this 15-year interim — but they’ve also never been more hungry for a win, given that innovation is slowing to a crawl in fields that the public can observe and iterative, slow improvements don’t seem to be capturing the imagination anymore. AI, heralded as the next grand frontier, has yet to deliver meaningful benefits to the public beyond novelty, despite tech figureheads stressing its importance, which alternates between prophecies of utopian abundance and apocalyptic consequences. Regardless, those initials are the only letters that the monied want to hear, so the tech is forcefully applied even when, perhaps, it shouldn’t be, with awful consequences for the physical world. The only people enjoying themselves outside of the super-rich are the scammers, who latch on like lampreys to current trends and exploit them for all they’re worth to pick the pockets of the desperate. The sad truth underlying all of this is that the world got its glimpse of a fully digital future and found it lacking, with even the most fervent advocates of an online life realizing how empty it all felt five years ago. The grid of interconnectivity has mostly led to isolation, algorithmically segregating the world by the user’s priors into, to echo that classic Twilight Zone episode, their own personal “other place,” where you always have the winning hand and the boredom that comes with it.
Call this mindset neo-Luddism if you want, but the difference is that it’s not just the weavers upset about the loom this time: It’s all those unsatisfied with AI slop polluting their feeds and search results, often with disaffected true believers at the forefront. But whatever it is, the mood is one of malaise, and Tron: Ares unwittingly reflects it. In one of the film’s fan-service moments, Leto’s character ventures back into a version of the Grid from the original Tron, vaporwave aesthetics and all. For the briefest of moments, one’s reminded of that movie and its promises of weird and wonderful things to come. It’s hard to imagine what it might have been if “the keys,” to paraphrase a hoary metaphor from Peters’ CEO, had been held in a different driver’s hands. We’ll never know — this fantasy is self-limited by its lack of imagination. What is certain is that the techno-optimism of the Tron series has never looked more mundane or sounded so falsely enthusiastic, all while retaining its bellwether status as a signpost for digital culture. Perhaps the next movie will be fully AI-generated and five minutes long — at least you won’t have to pay for a ticket and will be able to swipe up to get it off the screen and go back to cat videos.
* Frankenstein needs to be put on the well-worn shelf with the zombies and vampires, stat, before more AI company CEOs develop tragic-hero complexes and fully crater the economy.
** I’m not kidding.
*** This latter choice — which enabled Reznor and Ross to get producer credits — is an excellent one. If there’s one enduring thing about the project, it’ll be this music, which is perfect background scoring for your next Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough.
**** The Black Hole was also a Disney production, but it was the first one to get a PG rating when that meant something, and was released with a Buena Vista Pictures tag instead of the Magic Castle. It’s also fucking scary.