TRON: Ares
It has been over forty years since disgruntled former ENCOM employee Kevin Flynn attempted to gain evidence that his work had been plagiarised by his former executive Ed Dillinger and ended up on the wrong side of the computer screen, a player in the games of the Grid, and fifteen years since his son, Sam Flynn, engaged in a similar quest to locate his missing father
The computer gaming giant ENCOM still standing and ready to launch a new iteration of Space Paranoids, it has a new rival, Dillinger Systems, led by the ambitious and ruthless Julian Dillinger, determined not to enter the Grid but to bring constructs from the digital world into the real, making a presentation to investors to demonstrate his master control security program Ares but withholding the information that it will derezz after twenty-nine minutes.
ENCOM executive Eve Kim convinced that the answer is in the theoretical “permanence code,” in Alaska she accesses the original workstation of Kevin Flynn, the first company to demonstrate the ability to stabilise digital matter the one whose vision will preside, ENCOM positing a benevolent world where hunger can be alleviated by creating food and resources from patterns but Dillinger using Ares for industrial espionage to achieve dominance.
The third in the TRON sequence and the first in which the title character does not appear, TRON: Ares is directed by Joachim Rønning from a screenplay by Jesse Wigutow, inspired by the characters and situations created by Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird for the 1982 original and director Joseph Kosinski’s 2010 sequel TRON: Legacy, the story coming full circle as the computer world escapes into reality, bringing family friendly chaos.
Unable to shake that it is a Disney film, as Recognizers collide with skyscrapers, fighter jets crash out of the sky and cars are overturned, the news reports conspicuously fail to address any casualties which might have occurred, the frosty Elisabeth Dillinger (The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson wasted in a role beneath her, as is Jamie Marks Is Dead’s Cameron Monaghan in his momentary cameo) berating her son not for the disaster he has brought upon the city but for the reputational damage to the company she brought to success.
A one-note chip off the one-note block, Julian (X-Men: Apocalypse’s Evan Peters) is similarly singular, obsessed with his vision of releasing digital constructs from the Grid with no thought as to how they will be deployed or what the consequences will be, presumably never having seen Jurassic Park in his expectation his militarised artificial intelligence creations will be predictable and controllable, though unlike Eve (Wayward Pines’ Greta Lee), drifting through life following the death of her sister uncertain how best to honour her memory, he at least he has focus and a goal.
Named for the god of war, Ares (Blade Runner 2049’s Jared Leto) at least has a simulacrum of conflict in his programmed character, made of light but as ephemeral as the firefly he grasps at, defying Dillinger and hunted by his former his lieutenant Athena (Nightflyers‘ Jodie Turner-Smith) as he sides with Eve in pursuit of a life outside the Grid but a love of Depeche Mode is not a whole character, and for all its flash TRON: Ares is empty, a fabulous looking action film devoid of ideas, at its best when remembers where it came from in the archaic servers still inhabited by the persisting simulation of Kevin “Obi-Wan” Flynn (Jeff Bridges).
Lightcycles blazing down city streets less exciting that it might sound, how they and the gravity-defying Recognizers operate in a world where the laws of physics are fixed rather than compliant code is sidestepped, the film instead reliant on the momentum of Nine Inch Nails’ propulsive beats to carry it forward, but while that tortured rage fits the tone of the film the original is a classic because, like Wendy Carlos’ score, beneath the melancholy it was uplifting and optimistic, a world illuminated by possibility, TRON: Ares undeniably higher definition but having forgotten that joy is more moving than cynicism.
Tron: Ares is currently on general release and also screening in IMAX
