Something Has Been Corrupted in the Copied Code of Tron: Ares

There are few films that provided as memorable an experience as seeing Tron in theatres back in 1982. Sure, seeing Star Wars as a 5-year old back in 1977 was incalculably transformative, and witnessing decades later the thump of an arriving T-Rex in Jurassic Park was equally sublime, but although those films have been suitably enshrined in popular conscience, in some ways Tron’s legacy has been allowed to languish.

Screening Disney’s pioneering film just as arcade fever was gripping the land, and as beige-boxed PCs were becoming ubiquitous in both workplaces and the home, is an experience difficult to put into words for generations weaned on supercomputers in their pockets and an always-connected world. To this day Disney’s brand liberally uses the word magic, but that’s truly how it felt to be in that darkened room seeing imagery that felt not only entirely modern, but almost otherworldly, using technology so advanced it felt alien.

Decades on, the look of people in hockey helmets festooned with day-glo illuminated strips feels clunky, and the blocky animation and jerky movements of the animated elements almost ridiculous compared to contemporary computer graphics imagery, akin to a crayon drawing next to a painting at the Louvre. Yet there was a purity in that original film’s style that still has the power to enthrall, the seeming simplicity of the visuals cutting through the clutter of modern filmmaking and showing that with a few simple polygons an entirely different world can be experienced.

Tron: Ares arrives almost a half century later to mine this pent-up nostalgia, attempting to essentially pave the way for a grand Tronaissance. Where Joseph Kosinki’s 2010 chapter overtly leaned into the notion of continuing the legacy of the original (hence, of course, being named Tron: Legacy), this Son-of-Flynn action adventure leans into its more contemporary capabilities, reveling in the revolution of visual effects that the first film helped foster and showing off the newest of new toys.

Of course, 15 years later some visuals from that sequel have aged in some ways even more poorly than the original, especially the de-aging of the original star Jeff Bridges. Amusingly, Ares in an early scene tries to illustrate its technical superiority, yet still suffers from the uncanniness that’s the bane of almost every character animator trying to make a human look, well, human.

The narrative for the latest story is even more convoluted than the last, centering around the search for a piece of code that will allow elements from the virtual world to be able to exist for more than a limited time in our own sphere. We meet the titular Ares (Jared Leto), a “million lines of code” character ostensibly designed at a kind of security software. Created by Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of the baddie from the first film, Ares is shown off to gathered military personnel to demonstrate the weaponization of this sort of tech, hiding the fact that after just under 30 minutes the in-world character automatically returns to its virtual realm.

Eve Kim (Greta Lee) is the new boss of the tech powerhouse ENCOM, for the most part moving away from what was setup in the last film. It’s her drive to recover this McGuffiny set of code that pits her against Julian’s corporate malfeasance, while providing for the second film in a row a young person with seemingly infinite wealth reluctant to run the business that fuels their various interests with little in the way of oversight.

Although a photograph of Garret Hedlund’s character from Legacy does make a cameo during a montage, Cillian Murphy’s character of Ed Dillinger Jr. seemingly has been rendered irrelevant, no doubt due to some better gigs that have come the Oscar-winner’s way of late. Instead, we’re gifted with some scene chewing from Gillian Anderson who, thanks to the locations shot in and around Vancouver, returns professionally to the site of her broadcast television success during the height of her X-Files fame.

Other new characters include a statuesque Jodie Turner-Smith as Athena, a formidable fighter from the virtual world that takes seriously her orders in a way that the seemingly compromised Ares does not. Arturo Castro and Hasan Minhaj play keyboard warriors who hack away at flat, glass-panel keyboards, all to inject a bit of nerdiness suitable for those more used to touchscreens and there to provide the odd blast of exposition or clunky quip.

A major contributor to the original film’s artistic success was the gloriously synthetic soundtrack by Wendy Carlos. For all its faults, Legacy’s score by Daft Punk is not one of them, and their incorporation of the massive sounds generated by vintage modular instruments and even a cheeky cameo by the duo is a major highlight. For this third chapter, another electronic-minded duo in the form of Atticus Ross/Trent Reznor bring their Nine Inch Nails aesthetic to the fore, while still very much paying homage to Carlos’ iconic sonic palate. The result is, again, not as remarkable as the original, or as impactful as that in the second film, but a satisfying blend of all the former influences, resulting in some welcome and truly pulse-pounding musical moments when blared from behind the massive IMAX screen.

Director Joachim Rønning is no stranger to taking on franchise films for Disney and seemingly leaving little mark of his own, having in workmanlike fashion helmed the likes of the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean film, Dead Men Tell No Tales and Mistress of Evil, the second Maleficent film (which, of course, was itself birthed from the original Sleeping Beauty storyline). There’s little in the way of pure originality here, and from the narrative elements down to the stark visuals this chapter is more literally a mash-up of the first two films. From the visuals to the storyline to the general direction, it all feels very much like cogs in a machine, setting the stage for future chapters no doubt, but lacking even a modicum of its own sense of style and place.