Disappointing
Summary
Tron: Ares is a visual treat with a fantastic soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails, but the story and characters are a major letdown.
Plot: Ares (Jared Leto) teams with the CEO of ENCOM (Greta Lee) to find the permanence code to allow him to live in the real world beyond 29 minutes.
Review: I was late to the Tron game; I had the read-along book when I was a kid, but I was never able to sit through the movie. Much later, my buddy, J-Man, finally showed it to me, and I thought it was well deserving of its legendary status. I was a day one attendee of the sequel, Tron: Legacy and thought it was an incredible follow-up to its predecessor, rare in this day and age. Therefore, it was a no-brainer for me to check out Tron: Ares.
Let’s start with the good. As you would expect from a Tron movie, it’s visually arresting. The majority of the action takes place in the real world, and it’s kind of neat to see lightcycles driving around the streets and a Recognizer looming over a cityscape. The forays into the grids (yes, they go into two separate ones) are awesome, especially going into the original Tron grid. Supplementing the action is an absolutely killer soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails. I found myself realizing at various points that the soundtrack suggested a much more exciting movie than what was unfolding in front of my eyes. This is one of the best soundtracks to a film in a long, long time, and it’s a bit unfortunate that it’s wasted on this movie.
As for action, there are a couple of impressive set pieces. At one point, there’s a chase in the city streets between Greta Lee’s character and the Ares and Athena programs – it’s pretty lengthy and features some fantastic visuals. The final sequence is devastating, with the Recognizer laying havoc on the city, including taking out a pair of fighter jets (piloted by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). In between, there are action bits here and there, but the main spectacle is those two aforementioned set pieces.
That’s the good. Now, let’s get to the bad. The story kind of sucks. I feel like this was another movie, and someone decided to shoehorn it into the Tron world because, as you all know, no one wants to take a chance on new material without a known IP attached. It’s very bland and predictable. There’s not much explanation for why anything is happening besides the basics (we both want something, we don’t know why, but the story says we do, so there you go). I read somewhere that someone said this script felt like ChatGPT authored it, and you know what? They’re right.
The pacing…well, it’s under two hours, but feels like a longer movie. That will happen when there are a lot of draggy places. Anytime the action stops and the characters try to give what you’re seeing on the screen some meaning, the film just splats on the pavement like dog shit thrown out of a third-story window. As I said, there’s no motivation why anyone wants to do anything other than the obvious, and any attempts by the script to justify what’s unfolding in front of our eyeballs feels contrived and shrug-inducing.
Moving on to the characters…what characters? Yes, Jeff Bridges makes a cameo as Flynn and the five minutes of screen time he gets feel livelier than 100 minutes of Greta Lee or Jared Leto. Evan Peters does his overacting best as the main villain, and Jodie Turner-Smith’s wooden performance is forgivable in the sense that she’s a program, but the two leads are entirely non-descript. Leto’s performance is especially confounding as he goes from emotionless program to wise-cracking, earnest hero in the blink of an eye. Greta Lee could be replaced with a recliner, and no one would notice. These are the two emotional pillars of this movie, and they provide the emotion and charisma of that dirty cloth you just used to clean your washroom. The rest of the cast is equally bland, with Gillian Anderson noteworthy only because of her name and status.
Do I recommend this movie? If all you care about is visuals and soundtrack, yes. If you give a damn about the Tron universe, though, and the films that came before it, then I can’t really recommend it at all. Tron is more than just pretty visuals and soundtracks; there was a grand adventure and a whole universe created by its predecessors, which this movie does not respect, other than throwing the audience a few lazy bones.