Tron Ares is so bad it makes Tron Legacy look good
Before we get into it: I will need to spoil the entire plot to break down why I believe this movie isn't just bad, but VERY bad and offensive to boot. I am aware of the Jared Leto problem, that will come up in the piece. I waited until well after release to go catch the thing at a near-empty morning showing, both for the usual pandemic reasons and because I refuse to play into opening weekend numbers.
I kind of love Tron, though I would not say it's great. It has aged, that is certain - but at its core is computing as a fragile path to utopia that takes work to preserve. That speaks to me. That matters to me. And I'm a sucker for the aesthetic, which it allows itself to linger on.
Tron: Legacy is gorgeous and hey, the first half-hour or so could almost be a decent movie maybe. Then it gets mired in insulting damseling, a simplistic world-savior plot, and pretentious lore that doesn't quite keep its sights on the core themes of the series. It's a bad movie and a colossal waste.
Tron: Ares is worse in every single way.
Make a demo about it
Tron: Ares could have, should have been gorgeous. Neon red on glossy black? Light Cycle walls in squared-off streets between skyscrapers? A colossal Recognizer drifting between buildings, seen through windows in a shot directly evoking kaiju movies? A swarm of drones tracing oddly geometric lines through the city's grid? YES PLEASE.
None of it hits. The editing is rushed, nothing lingers. The framing is always competent but never interesting. What should have been an audiovisual treat instead becomes by-the-numbers. All of it is trite and executed with neither flair nor originality, squandering the hard work of VFX artists.
There is exactly one highly memorable shot, during a fight scene in the Good Corporation's digital world: the titular Ares is on a huge staircase, anonymous in his armor, shot from above. The physical space collapses into disorienting abstract lines. Nine Inch Nails blares. It lasts five seconds.
I've followed the demoscene from afar for a decade, despite never producing anything myself and not having set foot at Revision for years (please get a better covid policy, y'all). Looking at Tron: Ares, I find myself wishing it was a couple of excellent PC demos instead of a movie. Then maybe someone would have realized that a banger like Shadow Over Me belongs in the actual fucking movie.
The misuse of music is staggering. The main theme is haunting but outside of the intro and the final fight scene - which, believe you me, we'll get back to - it is never deployed in interesting ways. The songs from the soundtrack are near-totally absent: even the credits only gets a few chopped-up parts of As Alive As You Need Me To Be, which would have been much better used as thematic backing to Ares' first incarnation into the real world.
And with the credits freed up, you could have put Shadow Over Me in there. Its absence is baffling. It's a high-energy song built with the main theme. It screams "credit song". It's not there. It's not anywhere. What the hell.
This is all surface-level disappointment. I at least expect a Tron movie to wow my eyes and ears, and I did not get that. I also expected to have my intelligence insulted and I suppose in that way Tron: Ares exceeded my expectations by a mile.
Damsel 2.0 and misogynoir
Did Tron: Legacy piss you off when it built up a strong, eerie female character that turned incompetent the second Flynn Junior was around? Tron: Ares apparently believes this was nowhere near enough. Eve Kim is CEO of a big tech company, an Asian-American woman, and a brilliant programmer who's on track to save the world. This, of course, means she gets damseled, lectured about her insecurities and trauma by a glorified antivirus (we'll get to that), and turned into the literal McGuffin because killing her to extract something is the baddie's goal.
No, really. She found a piece of information from Flynn Senior (so she didn't invent it). She put it on a USB drive (which she destroys at the end of a chase). She doesn't actively remember the information (so she can't do anything with it), but she's seen it so she is now valuable as a passive data container. The plot's main thrust is that she must go back into the computer so the secret can be extracted, murdering her in the process. Every detail here is custom-crafted to rob her of agency.
Hey, remember when Users were always unusually powerful in the digital world? Guess that only applies if you're a cis white dude, or called Flynn.
I'm not going to break down all her scenes in detail. Suffice to say that her role in the climax of the movie is "acting as bait" and "kicking Ares' frisbee back his way". It's insulting.
Luckily, the movie has more female characters! There's the bad guy's mom. She's the Better CEO who thinks it's risky - not wrong, risky - to lie to the board. She gets killed as a result of her son's incompetence, because Athena sees her as an obstacle towards obeying said son's directives. Oh well, RIP Nagging Mom, we hardly knew ye.
Who's Athena, you'll ask? She's a security program working under Ares, also brought into the real world to chase Eve / the McGuffin. She's a black woman with heavy eyeliner and short blond hair. She does not question her orders or her status as an underling. She clearly delights in mayhem and using big weapons. She gets no personality, no complexity, no regrets. Until her deaths, that is. In one, her murderous labor is interrupted by the feeling of raindrops. Ares was first to bring up that rain made his feel things, though, so this is just her being the underling some more.
The final battle is a disk-and-stick fight between Ares made human (we'll get to that too), and Athena plus some goons. Athena is in her last minutes of real world life. With the grid she comes from shut down, she cannot return. She gets defeated, of course. She gets mutilated, of course. She awaits her final death in Ares' arms, of course. And it is then, encouraged by a white man portrayed by an accused sex pest, that she sees the error of her ways right before dissolving into screaming cubes. Great, definitely good optics there.
Dollar store Frankenstein
So, who's this Ares guy anyway? He's a security program, trained as the perfect soldier. His introduction is maybe the most competent part of the film: as the main theme thumps through the speakers, we alternate between hands repeatedly starting a training script, and an anonymous figure being forced into deadly combat again and again until he prevails. Ares is portrayed by Jared Leto, who is accused of sexual misconduct - including against teenagers - by no fewer than nine women.
Ares receives orders directly from Nepo Baby Bad CEO who names him "Master Control", in an obvious callback to the Master Control Program of the first movie. This does not actually matter.
Ares is brought into the real world by a magical laser that can create physical objects from digital data. This is the core plot of the movie and does not actually matter. What matters is that Ares has FEELINGS, you see. It's raining when he takes physical form and this makes him feel things. He is tasked with stealing Eve Kim's personal file so Nepo Baby Bad CEO can find the McGuffin, and witnessing this woman's FEELINGS gives him FEELINGS.
In her files are quotes from Frankenstein. I am not kidding.
When tasked with killing Eve, Ares rebels. He lies to Athena, pretending he did not get a clear order. He helps Eve escape, in exchange for the magic word that will make him human. None of this is compelling because the dialog is boring, the acting not remotely compelling or intriguing, and the whole plot tremendously creepy.
The movie attempts to lampshade its own bullshit: as Eve and Ares flee, the tone suddenly shifts into romcom clichés once the security program decides he can also provide psychoanalysis due to knowing her entire file. This is undermined by the dialog being boring again, Jared Leto being a creep to begin with, and the conclusion of the scene being an unchallenged "Well I was supposed to kill you so by comparison hacking's not so bad".
None of it is funny. None of it is deep. None of it even provides texture for Ares as a character, except that he's a creep. He is not amusing, he is not charming, any suggestion of conflict always ends with Eve - CEO of a giant tech corporation! - apparently agreeing. It's a miracle they don't end up kissing. I guess we can thank Disney's prudishness for that.
Anyway eventually Ares goes into a fan-service 80s version of the Grid to defend to Jeff Bridges that he deserves to be human because he can't actually explain why he likes Depeche Mode.
In conclusion, Tron is a land of contrasts
Tron: Ares wants you to think it has things to say about AI. If it had focused solely on the Nepo Baby Bad CEO lying to his board about what the magical laser 3D printer can produce versus the Good CEO using the magical laser 3D printer to make the world a better place, it could have had something to say about the political landscape of tech. It'd have been simplistic, but that's fair enough for a Disney feature.
Tron: Ares wants you to think it has things to say about AI. If it had focused solely on its titular character and on what it means to be an artificial being, without making him a creep, without treating women like shit on the way, it could have had something to say about consciousness and free will and existence. It'd have been simplistic, but that's fair enough for a Disney feature.
Instead it tried to do both of those things at once, throwing in an end-of-the-world scenario by way of a Black woman who knows no horizon other than following orders, only for her to get told by a white man that actually she could be free as she dies screaming in pain. Maybe Tron: Ares should have been a disaster movie taking deeper inspiration from kaiju tropes: those, after all, have a baked-in understanding that catastrophe is human-made. Instead it's just a disaster.
Tron: Ares does not know what it wants to be. Tron: Ares is visually and musically boring, profoundly confused about what it wants to say, and deeply offensive to women of color in particular.
In short, Tron: Ares is bad. It is so insultingly bad that it makes Tron: Legacy look good by comparison. I truly never thought I'd see the day.