Tron: Ares: Jared Leto – Photo: Leah Gallo/Disney Enterprises, Inc.
For one brief, deranged moment, I actually considered asking ChatGPT to write a Tron: Ares review for this magazine. What could be more appropriate?
Naturally, I came to my senses. Like the AI in Tron: Ares, ChatGPT wouldn’t be offering an actual opinion — it can’t sit in an IMAX theater (yet, I think) — just a regurgitation of whatever it scraped from the web. And honestly, I couldn’t care less what others think about Disney’s film series. I only care what I think.
And here’s what I think: it’s trash. Pretty trash. Gleaming trash. Sleek trash. Trash with a kickass soundtrack. But trash, nonetheless.
You could convincingly argue there’s never been a good Tron movie — and that’s saying something, seeing that over forty years, they’ve only made three.
The original Tron came out in 1982, and I remember as a young twentysomething being astonished by its visuals. We’d never seen anything like its groundbreaking computer-generated effects and luminous frame-by-frame enhancements. That lightcycle chase? Thrilling. But director Steven Lisberger’s story wasn’t just stupid — it was monumentally stupid. Game designer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) gets sucked into a computer grid where programs are personified as humanoid figures in glowing spandex jumpsuits and absurd motorcycle helmets, battling the evil Master Control Program in a quest for — I still don’t know — the ultimate floppy disk?
It was a dazzling display of technology, and, this being Disney, it even included a cute “blippy-bloopy” orb named Bit that could only respond — often frantically — in binary. (There would be no non-binary in Tronworld, nosiree.) Weirdly, Tron struck a cultural chord that long overstayed its sustain.
In 2010, Disney released a sequel, Tron: Legacy, which I had somehow mercifully managed to avoid until earlier this year. Bloated, self-serious, and utterly bereft of charm or logic, it turned out to be even dumber than the original.
Now, fifteen years later, in a quest to out-stupid its predecessors, comes a third installment. Its plot can be summed up in two sentences, and for that, we’ll now turn to ChatGPT:
“In Tron: Ares, a powerful program named Ares is brought from the digital world into reality as part of an experiment to bridge humans and artificial intelligence. Once free in the real world, Ares discovers that human motives are far murkier than code, and his mission quickly turns into a struggle over control, identity, and survival.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Well, I could have — but why bother?
Besides, you’re not going to Tron: Ares for narrative refinement. You’re going for the visuals — striking, if you are fanatical about deep, shimmery blacks and retina-burning jungle reds — and the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, which powers the film better than its script ever could. Honestly, you’d get more satisfaction listening to it at home through good headphones while munching on edibles. (I’d say “toke,” but hey, protect those lungs, kids.)
There’s one moment in Tron: Ares that will warm the heart of anyone who was there at the start in 1982 — a beautifully realized sequence that makes you wonder why the whole movie didn’t lean more into nostalgia. (It does trot out Bridges again, who seems to be doing a holographic version of The Dude.)
Let’s talk about Ares, played by Jared Leto with all the screen charisma of a soggy waffle. Ares sports a ramshackle beard and disturbingly oily hair. Do they not have showers in the Grid? Shampoo? Conditioner? No matter — he’s gross. And all those steely, baby-blue stares can’t disguise his inability to inhabit a character with conviction. Leto isn’t the worst actor alive, but he’s easily one of the most overrated.
Tron: Ares: Greta Lee and Jared Leto – Photo: Leah Gallo / Disney Enterprises, Inc.
To be fair, I enjoyed Greta Lee as the new CEO of ENCOM, even though her role is largely confined to fleeing murderous programs, cowering, and shrieking. Evan Peters has some over-the-top fun as the bratty, rampaging megalomaniac Julian Dillinger — a proper chip off the original’s grandpa Ed, who as portrayed by David Warner at least brought some class to the villainy with a bitter scowl and an impeccable British accent. Here, British accent duty falls to Gillian Anderson as Dillinger’s scolding mother. She adds little beyond giving audiences the chance to mutter, “Remember how good she was in The X Files?”
My favorite moment in Tron: Ares comes at the start, during a “catch us up” montage, when we glimpse computer-enhanced versions of tech journalist Kara Swisher and former anchor Robin Roberts, both LGBTQ pioneers, doing a talking-head thing. It’s about as gay as the film gets — but still, it was nice to feel represented, if only for a (cough) Bit.
Tron: Ares (★★☆☆☆) is rated PG-13 and is playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
Even by the unhinged standards of Stephen King’s wicked imagination, the United States of America envisioned in The Long Walk is one fucked up country. And yet, an American society that makes a contest of sacrificing its sons to gun violence, ostensibly for the sake of the republic, doesn’t fall far outside the realm of future possibilities.
King published the novel in 1979, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, when enlisting contenders from each state into a deadly marathon of endurance, forcing them to keep up the pace or be shot to death by soldiers, must have read as an outlandishly grim metaphor for sending boys to war.
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