“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 Nine Inch Nails’ 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” with help from a generative laser that reconstitutes him as a physical being in our world. 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 kingdom. He inherited them from his mother Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson), the previous CEO, and one of those only-in-the-movies executives who has a conscience and is disgusted by the idea of putting profits ahead of people. Another character in that vein 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 and discovered by Eve’s late sister, who died of cancer a few years earlier.
Eve is aptly named; her first successful use of the Permanence Code is an orange tree that materializes in the otherwise barren snowscape. 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 a paradise she hopes to create on earth. This paradise would include cures to the most feared diseases, including cancer, plus ethical uses of AI that don’t steal or exploit.
Unfortunately, Eve occupies the same space in this story as Flynn in the first film: she’s a dreamer, creator, and counterculture-coded idealist, not a tactician (although she is forced by circumstances to become one). Such individuals are constantly at risk of being ripped off by businesspeople who don’t have the talent or imagination to create and would rather steal anyway because it’s so 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 surely remembers it, his minions will extract it from her mind and then kill or delete her, depending on the setting.
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, which will require him to rebel.
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 physical world that’s been invaded by digitally-generated machines and creatures, including light cycles, batwing-looking gliders, and my favorite, The Recognizer, which evokes stone archways in an ancient civilization.
Prior to this, Rønning was not on anyone’s list of must-see filmmakers, but I think “TRON: Ares” puts him there. Whether he’s finally been unleashed after years on a corporate choke-chain, matched up with superior collaborators, or simply improved as a filmmaker, this is a remarkable leap in his career, with a style that, like Reznor and Ross’ trance-inducing score, embodies and amplifies the content. (The musicians get two of the best cameos in the film; watch for them.) There are regular transitions between major sequences and within montages—mainly hard cuts and dissolves—but “TRON: Ares” is more interested in in finding ways to suggest how the digital world obliterates once-unsolvable geography problems, speeds everything up, and wreaks havoc with our sense of what is “real.” The movie might, say, zoom into a television screen until a single dot of resolution fills the entire widescreen canvas, then continue on to reveal a reflection in glass in the real world, which takes us back into meatspace. A lot of exposition is handled with theme-driven imagery rather than in spoken dialogue, as in the sequence in the digital world where Ares researches Eve’s family, moving through a collection panels of assorted shapes and sizes, each highlighting a meaningful scrap of text or imagery, as if visiting a gallery where art hangs from the ceiling 0n transparent wires.
Sometimes the movie transitions from reality to virtual reality, back to reality, and to virtual reality again. After a while, the distinction between types of environments starts to seem like an increasingly unhelpful label. Real people’s lives are dominated by virtual happenings. Virtual happenings reflect or shape what occurs in homes and offices, and on city streets. Everyone and everything is part of a program. Handheld weapons and vehicles translated from the virtual world vehicles leave traces of light that are also solid and can be touched. The fight scenes evoke time-lapse photos of fire dancers inscribing the air with their movements. Editing matches shots in ways that reinforce these ideas, as in a sequence that channels classic image-driven documentary “Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance)” where helicopter shots gazing down on modern cities alternate with micro-closeups of circuit boards, revealing that the organizing principle of both is the grid.
This is a stunning movie to watch and listen to, 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 Ares needed someone like Ryan Gosling, but then I remembered that he already kinda played this role, brilliantly, in “Blade Runner 2049.” Here, too, a nonhuman lead gets compared to Pinocchio longing to be a real boy. Pinocchio is itself/himself a Frankenstein derivative— as Guillermo del Toro will happily admit, having told both stories. Athena is an altogether more fascinating character, a good soldier who’s been passed over for promotion but gradually understands her assigned role in the greater scheme. Ares, Athena and Eve become points of a narrative triangle, each sparking realizations in the others. Smith gives more of a dancelike performance than a dramatic one, as dictated by the part, but it’s just right throughout, building to an operatic exit.
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. Everything is Frankenstein. We encounter creators and their handiwork at every turn. The creators learn that you can’t really control anything, that no amount of technological innovation will change that all is impermanence. The created recognize that social pecking orders and assigned roles and are ephemeral as code, and that inside every intelligent being is a core of morality that can either be encouraged or suppressed.
We are what others make us, until we remake ourselves. 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.”
