“TRON: Ares” is the second sequel to the 1982 original “Tron,” which was largely dismissed by critics during its initial release. The founder of this site stood apart from the majority, calling it “a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun,” and awarded it four stars.
The same description applies here; thus, the equally high rating. “TRON: Ares” is spectacularly designed, swiftly paced, thoughtfully written (by Jesse Wigutow, from a story by himself and David Digilio), and directed (by Joachim Rønning) within an inch of its neon-hued life. The techno score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross adds to the film’s grandeur and imbues it with a philosophical, questioning undertone that is often intriguingly at odds with its kinetic transitions and geometry-fracturing action set-pieces. The sum total is a rave of a movie that acts as its own hallucinogen, and that is best experienced on a huge screen with a state-of-the-art sound system. If they’d played it again right after I saw it for the first time, I would have gladly stayed in my seat.
In the first “Tron,” the innovative programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) created five great videogames for the ENCOM Corporation, including the all-time smash Space Paranoids, only to see them stolen by its CEO Ed Dillinger (David Warner), who created the MCP (Master Control Program) to steal whatever he wanted, and reduced Flynn to data points and imprisoned him in the The Grid, a virtual space defined by geometric shapes. Flynn escaped and deposed Dillinger, and then in the 1980s (as explained in “Tron: Legacy”) was moved by his wife’s death to explore tech that could somehow digitally preserve their essences. The title character in this movie is a digital being (played by Jared Leto), an assassin who can travel between the digital world and so-called “meat space.” Ares is the brainchild of Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of Ed Dillinger. Julian hopes to sell nigh-invulnerable creatures like Ares and his elegantly lethal lieutenant Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) to the military and other entities with flexible morals.
Like other characters in the movie, Julian has access to a generative laser that can reproduce digital structures in real space, as solid, working machines and beings. Picture a 3-D printer crossed with a transporter from “Star Trek.” An owner of such a device could conjure a virtual army in cyberspace and materialize it in our world instantly. Imagine if belligerent heads of state (or individuals) possessed that sort of technology. The thought doesn’t bother Julian. “The question is not whether the car should be built,” he says, giving a roomful of military leaders an analogy that he hopes will kickstart their arms-race anxiety. “The car is being built right now. The question is, who’s holding the keys?” This is a self-justifying point of view that’s heard every day in our world—most recently in arguments about whether Generative AI should be regulated, and the industry’s blatant theft of content and labor punished. Like Gen AI, the tech presented here is in its embryonic stage and is essentially defective, unable to perform what it’s represented as being capable of doing. All the new stuff that’s created by the laser disintegrates in 29 minutes, leaving only dust.
Julian holds the keys to the new tech. He inherited them from his mother Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson), the previous CEO, and one of those only-in-the-movies executives who has principles. Another is Eve Kim (Greta Lee), the current CEO of Encom, who saved the company from bankruptcy with new and updated games. Now, she wants to manifest her utopian instincts by locating a “Permanence Code” created by Flynn in an off-the-grid research station in the Arctic.
Eve is aptly named; her first successful use of the Permanence Code is an orange tree that materializes in the otherwise barren snowscape. In a movie filled with allusions to past literature and mythology, this one goes back to the dawn of written communication; in contrast to the biblical Eve who samples the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and gets herself and Adam kicked out of paradise, the Eve of “TRON: Ares” creates the tree herself, as a forerunner of the paradise she hopes to create on earth. This paradise would include cures to the most feared diseases, including cancer, which took her sister at a young age.
Unfortunately, Eve occupies the same space in this story as Flynn in the first film: she’s a dreamer, creator, and counterculture-coded idealist who’s constantly on the verge of being ripped off by soulless businesspeople who don’t have the talent or imagination to create new things and would rather steal the work of others anyway because it’s much easier. When Eve is on the verge of being apprehended by Ares, Athena, and other dimension-crossing assassins, after a dazzling chase with light cycles through a real metropolis, she destroys the drive holding the only copy of the Permanence Code. This leads Dillinger to improvise a grotesque workaround: Since Eve has seen the code and must remember it, his minions will delete/kill her, then extract it from her mind.
But Ares turns out to have a dissenting worldview that’s at odds with his mission statement to obey his controller. This is not a spoiler, by the way—the first time Ares enters our world, he’s entranced by it, and immediately reveals gentle instincts. Stepping out of the warehouse where he and his digital soldiers just performed a demo and into a rainy nightscape, Ares glances down at raindrops speckling his arm, then up at light towers swarming with insects. He catches an insect in his hand and regards it with what could be described as “wonder” if he had an expressive face (he doesn’t at this point in the story—but he’ll take baby steps towards acquiring one). Like the title character of “The Iron Giant,” himself a Frankenstein’s monster, Ares is on track to realize that he is not a weapon, or prefers not to be, and that this will require him to rebel against his creators and handlers.
The movie would be a proudly blatant Frankenstein descendant even without the direct quote Ares encounters while researching his target Eve: “I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” That’s Mary Shelley’s monster talking, asserting his autonomy and self-worth, despite being told that he’s only a tool meant to destroy, not create. If you’re reading this and thinking that it sounds like the first “Terminator” movie morphing into the second one—or maybe the original Terminator combined with Sarah Connor’s protector Kyle Reese—you’re on the right track. Eve, though, is no damsel in distress, probably because she’s spent her entire life playing video games and can apply her skills to a real world that’s suddenly been invaded by digitally-generated machines and creatures, including light cycles, batwing-looking gliders, and my personal favorite, The Recognizer, which evokes stone archways in an ancient civilization.
Whether Rønning was turned loose, given superior collaborators, or simply evolved as a filmmaker, “TRON: Ares” is a remarkable leap in his career, with a style that embodies and enhances its content. There are a few regular transitions between sequences—i.e., cuts and dissolves. Instead, the movie might, say, zoom into a television screen until a single dot of resolution fills the entire widescreen canvas, then continue to reveal a reflection in glass in the real world, which takes us back into meatspace.
The movie also goes in the opposite direction: from real to virtual. Sometimes it transitions from reality to virtual reality and back to reality, and then back to virtual reality again. After a while, the distinction between types of environments starts to seem like an arbitrary, essentially meaningless label: real people’s lives are dominated by virtual happenings, and virtual happenings respond to events in people’s homes and offices, and on city streets. Everyone and everything is part of the program. Light cycles and other vehicles leave traces of light that are also solid. So do handheld weapons. The fight scenes evoke time-lapse images of dancers performing with handheld flashlights, their movements mapped by the light trails in the wake.
This is a stunning movie to watch, and unexpectedly rewarding to think about, considering that it always has one eye on the audience and is determined not to bore them. I suppose you could complain that the characters are too archetypal, or just flat; that’s valid, though not a dealbreaker, since you could say the same about a lot of characters in ancient poetry and mythology who are defined by a handful of basic traits. There were also scenes where I wanted more of something from Leto. What? More depth, more poetry, or maybe just more modulation of his underplaying (something he’s not known for). I was tempted to write here that the part cried out for the talents of Ryan Gosling, but then I remembered that he already kinda played this role, brilliantly, in “Blade Runner 2049.” As in that movie, their nonhuman lead gets compared to Pinocchio, itself/himself a Frankenstein derivative (as Guillermo del Toro will tell you, having told both stories).
But as I said at the top of this piece, satisfying conventional ideas of proper storytelling is not high on this movie’s list of things to do. It’s content to be a maelstrom of ideas, images, and adrenaline-pumped action scenes that would probably translate well to a video game. There are moments of great poignancy as well, often falling in the damnedest places. Frankenstein’s monster could pull your heart from your chest without breaking a sweat, but he’d rather be contemplating a flower. Asked for a report of a recent visit to our world, Ares lands on details that his pixelated colleagues would consider irrelevant, but that mean everything to flesh-and-blood people: “I met a mother and a son,” he says. “It was raining.”
