Directed By Joachim Ronning

Starring – Jared Leto, Evan Peters, Greta Lee

The Plot – Follows a highly sophisticated Program, Ares (Leto), who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.

Rated PG-13 for violence/action

Tron: Ares – Official Trailer

POSITIVES

While plenty of the familiarities of this decades old franchise have changed in this third chapter, the one thing that remains the same is this being a sensorial siesta in the distinguished marriage of sight and sound, producing such transfixingly intoxicating imagery that plays spectacular on the biggest screen imaginable. Blessed with an abundance of ultraviolet color schemes, future technology, and an echoing heft of influence to the distinguishing tangibility of the movie’s special effects, Ronning wholeheartedly immerses us in the fantastically imaginative of such a unique spectacle, and while the movie’s substance leaves slightly more to be desired, in terms of its talking points and thematic heft, the frame by frame beauty and alluring updating of this artificial world never relents in its hypnotic entrancement, helping to maintain my vested interests to a film that nearly clocks in at two hours. Speaking of that runtime, I make the audacious claim that “Tron: Ares” is the single best paced installment of the entire franchise, beginning with an initialized urgency introduced in the opening set piece that not only sets a precedent for what’s to be maintained throughout the engagement, but also a hook into this particular conflict, that feels like the fully fledged realization of the pondered ideas tapped into with Steven Lisberger’s 1982 original film. Helping this aspect tremendously are an abundance of dazzlingly radiant and devastatingly destructive action set pieces that breed energy and urgency to stakes that are firmly contextualized and hanging overhead, but there’s also quite a few focal point characters that help to maintain a fresh appeal and eclectic benefit to the air of the storytelling, keeping it from spending too much time dully sedated in place for longer than necessary, especially considering the film touches on many of the talking points with artificiality that we’ve already strainingly covered in its predecessors. On top of this, the film’s very pulse and frenetic energy belong to rock gods, Nine Inch Nails, who ratchet intensity and ominousness to a score that is cloaked in the kind of electronic and techno-infused compositions that have made the band anything other than your conventional rock act. Being that lead singer, Trent Reznor, already knows a thing or two about scoring films, as he and fellow bandmate, Atticus Ross, have already built a prestigious career scoring major films such as “The Social Network”, “Challengers”, and “Gone Girl”, to name a few, and here their musical genius marries itself so synthetically with the air of the aforementioned scope and spectacle of its imagery, cementing a music video style captivity that works surprisingly well alongside the presentation of the narrative, with a dependency in its compositional usage that makes Reznor and his crew feel like living, breathing characters in the movie, who we can feel, even if we can’t see. Lastly, the performances are admittedly a mixed bag from this highly talented ensemble, but the beneficial side of them to the movie’s favor definitely spawned from Greta Lee, who effortlessly elicits the only palpable humanity throughout the film, as well as Jodie Turner-Smith, whose menacing presence as Athena, the T-1000 of this world, commanded scene-stealing attention, each time she stepped in front of the lens. While each of their characters are sadly deduced to being motivational plot devices meant to serve a male character, each of their emotional deliveries feel firmly plucked and conveyed from the roles being asked of them, without anything that feels either too flat or distractingly overzealous to a scene’s integrity, in turn cementing the idea that anything a man can do, a woman can do much better.

NEGATIVES

The pleasantries end there, however, as “Tron: Ares” is an inconsistent mess of a film that fails to maintain the consistency in quality of its predecessors, beginning an uninspiringly shallow screenplay that doesn’t break any new ground, with regards to the evolving battle with artificial intelligence, which the real world and specifically the movie industry, find themselves smack dab in the middle of. While the talking points are especially pedestrian, featuring pretentious dialogue that wants so desperately to be deeply profound, but instead executed mind-numbing simplicity, it’s essentially the familiarities of the outline that are most compromising to the originality of this idea, making this feel like an inferior descendent of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”, and not just because it involves two machines from another world being brought into our world, with one of them forced to protect a female with the power to change the future. Considering this film really doesn’t serve as a sequel to 2010’s “Tron Legacy”, beyond some brief exposition dumps during the opening sequence, it forces audiences to start over with a barrage of fresh characters, and with the characterization outlining feeling so flimsy and one-note for a majority of them, I never felt myself able to connect and invest emotionally in a single one of them, in turn undercutting the magnitude of the movie’s compelling drama, especially once the script delves into ideas about existentialism and muscle memory, featuring material that feels so predictably standard and stale that it never taps into a single profoundly endearing sentiment between them, in turn evading intelligence from a movie that wants to be a lot smarter than it actually is. Beyond this, even complaining about illogicality in a film like this feels crass and unnecessary, however the film’s inability to address inconsistencies about artificial technology being used in the real world, left me scratching my head consistently throughout the narrative, especially the motorcycles used from soldiers from the Grid, which run seamlessly, despite their own livelihoods being deduced to 29 minute lifespans in their constant crossover into the other world. It would be similar to Freddy Krueger being every bit as immortal in the real world as he was in the dream world, without even remotely addressing it, and considering it’s one of many leaps of logic that I had in maintaining my focus to the rules of its foundation, I found myself unintentionally laughing by how little the movie faithfully follows them in its execution. Aside from the tumultuous screenplay, the movie’s tone is also compromised by the kind of uncomfortably awkward and aggressive humorous underlining that Disney supplants to all of their live action properties, without anything even closely resembling an effective delivery that elicited even a gag reflex of pitiful chuckling. I’m all for some periodic levity, if it breaks the tension of a previous scene of conflict, but here the outbursts come at improper moments so intrusive to an urgent scene’s integrity that it often leads to these audibly piercing bouts with paralyzing silence, featuring material so childishly improper that it never feels synthetic coming from these characters or this world. Finally, the unimpressive side of the movie’s performances belong to Jared Leto and Evan Peters, who each are so distractingly improper in their various deliveries that it often saturated the nuance of the scenes they abrasively adorned. This is especially the case for Peters, whose ratcheted intensity during deliveries is one step shy of frequent fits of yelling, making him feel like the descendent of Eddie Redmayne’s character in “Jupiter Ascending”, and Leto, while effectively rendering the robotic monotone of artificial intelligence, at least initially, doesn’t evolve emotionally or expressively in ways that allow the real world influence to rub off on the consistency of his demeanor, leaving him the most boring and emotionally flat protagonist that nose dives so many of these integral moments, even with a Morbius costume far from blame, this time around.

OVERALL
“Tron: Ares” might be an audiovisual marvel of entrancing indulgences, involving alluring imagery and a Nine Inch Nails performed soundtrack, but its luminating style falls suspect to squandered substance in the storytelling, lacking any originally compelling inputs in the depths of its outdated programming. Between lacking lead performances, naggingly forced humor, and unengaging characters, there’s little spark outside of the cinematic spectacle to engaging audiences psychologically, and after three films, it’s time this film lived off of the Grid, for good.

My Grade: 5.5 or D+