‘Tron: Ares’ is a waste of time and talent

Apart from its bass-heavy original soundtrack courtesy of Nine Inch Nails, there’s really nothing to recommend about the film. There’s also nothing particularly novel about it, despite a barrage of expository dialogue that insists otherwise, beginning with news media talking heads explaining people’s anxieties about artificial intelligence. What exactly does Tron: Ares have to say about the issue? Well, it turns out that one of the original movie’s villains has a grandson, Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), who’s hellbent on 3-D-printing weaponry and humanoid “programs” to fight wars just like existing soldiers, though he hasn’t figured out how to stop them from collapsing every 29 minutes. If there’s any commentary about the disposability of human fighters at the behest of cruel militaries and governments, it’s lost amidst the movie’s hodgepodge about these infinitely replicable assets having any connection whatsoever to real concerns about war. You know, remote drones, A.I. targeting, and the likes.

Still, a greedy billionaire villain ought to be as easy a sell as it was in the early 1980s, and accepting this element of the plot on its own terms isn’t too much of an ask. Where things get messy, however, is in the broader plot involving video game designer Eve Kim (Lee) who, in addition to mourning her tech-savvy sister, is also in search of some secret code allegedly left behind by Flynn, which ought to make these 3-D renderings exist permanently in the real world. For Eve, this means creating a magic digital tree that bears real fruit—not an apple, as might be thematically appropriate, but an orange. There’s no temptation to be found, despite the movie’s half-formed hints towards theological heft; Eve is pure of heart, and therefore boring to watch.

To make things even more thematically muddled, Julian creates digital adversaries for this Biblically named heroine, whose monickers are Ares (Leto) and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), personified “programs” who exist primarily in the infinite digital real known as “the grid,” but who can now be projected into our world at will, albeit with that aforementioned 29 minute cap. Julian is, therefore, after Eve’s code, which will make these binary minions, named for Greek gods, stick around without crumbling to ash (just in case you needed more mismatched religious imagery). Ares, however, develops something of a conscience, and a desire to help Eve, both out of altruism, and because he wants to experience living life as a human being, in our reality.

Tron: Legacy had a similar character too, Olivia Wilde’s Quorra. However, where Quorra displayed real curiosity and intellect in her pursuit of becoming human and being liberated from the grid, Ares is a robotic bore. Leto, while detestable in his real life, has turned in great performances on occasion, but here, he seems too tethered to the idea of playing an artificial intelligence to actually imbue the character with anything resembling want or need. His desires are all limited to dialogue—much of which ends up in the form of flat remarks and punchlines about how “the ‘80s” were “classic,” accompanied by dead air as the film refuses to cut away from his overly somber close ups. It’s like watching a simulacrum of a nostalgic legacy revival, made even more soulless when the movie briefly apes the lo-fi aesthetics of the original film, for no other reason than empty throwback. If there are hardcore fans of the Tron franchise, surely it’ll take more than this to entertain them?

On the human side of things, Lee doesn’t fare much better, though it’s hardly her fault. She’s a wonderfully accomplished fixture of independent and arthouse cinema in which she’s created layered, soft spoken characters, and there’s probably a juicy mainstream role waiting for her somewhere. But Eve is largely reduced to explaining made-up tech jargon to the audience, though not in a way that lets us in on what the characters actually do or do not know. For instance, the casual presentation of humanesque programs being beamed into the real world is likely to give one the idea that this is a common occurrence in the fiction of Tron: Ares. It seems that way for a long time—that is, until Lee reacts with shock and awe at the concept some 20 minutes into doing battle with one of them through a city’s streets. You’d think their fancy, futuristic “light cycles” might have given it away, especially since they leave behind trails of solid plasma that sometimes act as dangerous laser beams able to cut you in half, and other times end up as solid obstacles you bump into. It really depends on what a given scene requires, but there are seldom any coherent stakes throughout the film. It certainly doesn’t help that the edit lingers painfully on Lee’s wordy dialogue, as though awkward silence might suddenly imbue it with meaning.

Similarly, the whole premise of programs being able to last only 29 minutes in the real world nullifies most action scenes on two major fronts. If an “evil” or villainous program is giving chase, all the heroes need to do is outrun them for a bit, and then they disappear. If one of the “good” programs like Ares is in danger, well, he can just be copied and printed again. Who cares?

Turner-Smith is perhaps the only truly dedicated performer in the film, given her character’s vicious commitment to killing and capturing Julian’s enemies. However, few of the human characters exist beyond their broad “types,” whether it’s Eve’s trusty, wisecracking sidekick Seth (Arturo Castro) or Ajay Singh (Hasan Minhaj), her…uh… Boss? Friend? Business partner? It’s not quite clear, and he ends up fulfilling the same quippy role as Seth in the climax anyway, as talkative tech support to the heroes. If you love watching people type a whole lot and react to lines of code, then the real-world sequences will be a treat. But what is perhaps most baffling about Tron: Ares is how fundamentally it seems to misunderstand the appeal of Tron in the first place.

Yes, “Tron” was the name of a character in the original film, but if you’re just now learning this, don’t blame yourself. The fun of the series has always been translating “code” and “programs” and this, that, or the other digital concept into video game vehicles and weapons, a simplified, childlike representation of what would be, to most viewers, an extremely boring thing to interpret otherwise. Julian, for instance, is interacting with lines of code when he programs Ares, even though we see the latter in “human” form, even in the grid. And yet, innumerable scenes in both the human and digital worlds are just people looking at screens, and interacting with screens, and reacting to screens, but nothing on those screens is ever enrapturing. It’s all just alphanumeric gibberish, almost as devastatingly boring as the movie’s characters and their limp, dimensionless drama, set in a human world that looks exactly as real (or fake) as the grid’s computerized landscape. Man, what a drag.