By Michael Marano

Tron: Ares hurries from one spectacular concept and one spectacular set piece to another. But it doesn’t take the time to let any of those remarkable things sink in.

Tron: Ares, directed by Joachim Rønning. Now screening at cinemas around New England

Jodie Turner-Smith in Tron: Ares. Photo: Leah Gallo/Disney

Tron: Ares is a movie fundamentally about trust forged between a human being and a renegade, sentient AI. The problem is that the film doesn’t trust its own (very good) ideas, and doesn’t trust its audience to engage with those ideas or its plot. The movie hurries from one spectacular concept and one spectacular set piece to another. But it doesn’t take the time to let any of those remarkable things sink in.

Good Science Fiction pauses for a sense of wonder to be evoked. Consider the “hold on and catch your breath” moments in 2001, Alien, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Solaris, etc. A great science fictional idea or plot point is presented in Tron: Ares, and then it’s immediately bulldozed by a barrage of special effects, action, art direction, and Nine Inch Nail’s tooth-shaking score. All of which are utterly fantastic, but they’re piled up as if they’re falling off a dump truck. Would I like to see a Rembrandt, a Picasso, a Jackson Pollock, and a Basquiat? Sure! But I want them hung on a wall, not tossed on top of each other in some guy’s garage. With better curation, Tron: Ares could have been something incredible. Instead, it’s a forgettable, if diverting, night at the movies.

Also, Tron: Ares doesn’t trust its audience to not be idiots. Or its characters to be anything but cardboard cutouts. The first 20 minutes, give or take, hurl four info dumps on us, drawing on the most agonizing and clichéd modes of info dumping. Off the bat, a barrage of newscasts front-loading background is hurled at us. Then we get the most annoying info dump method of all — the beautiful protagonist working on something amazing and explaining what they’re doing to their lumpy, dumpy, dummy of a sidekick, who’s only there to be a conduit for information the audience needs to overhear. Of course, it’s information the sidekick should already know. And then we have the “Aha! I have found the work notes of my blood relation and cracked their code!” spin on the “Found Diary” trick, which hasn’t worked since Gene Wilder, having just found his grandpa’s notes, screeched “IT COULD WORK!” in Young Frankenstein. And then we have the “Corporate Asshole Bad Guy Giving a Presentation on Their Evil New Tech Scene,” which is such a necrotic trope that it was parodied back in RoboCop, when the ED-209 blew that yuppie snot to strips of raw skirt steak.

That’s the first 20 minutes… with no drama, no real narrative, no nothing. And especially no character development. Our protagonist is tech mogul Eve Kim, played by Greta Lee (of Past Lives). Why is she our protagonist? Because we’re told so, via the exposition we’ve just been buried under. There’s no moment of connection created between her and the audience. She has no personality until she’s imperiled at about the 30-minute mark. Eve crosses paths with the titular Ares, a sentient program existing in cyberspace played by Jared Leto, who at the outset is showing signs of… conscience? Empathy? But the impact of that possibility is buried under the aforementioned visuals and Trent Reznor’s auditory bombardment. (Don’t get me wrong, I dig the soundtrack, and will probably buy it. But it’s not applied in a way that moves the story and, in fact, at times stops it dead.) There are riffs on Ares being a modern-day Frankenstein’s Monster for the ChatGPT age. Unfortunately this utterly fantastic idea is not developed. It’s dropped in favor of sensory bombardment; the cinematic choices of the director, and more likely the producers, come off as rampages as uncontrolled as those of Frankenstein’s Monster.

The thing is, the human villain of the story, Evan Peters as Julian Dillinger, grandson of the bad guy played by David Warner in the original Tron, is fleshed out at the start of Tron: Ares in ways no one else is. He’s a petulant little TechBro shit, with a face just begging to have a dodgeball ricochet off of it. And in a way, that’s kind of a problem. How the hell can fictional TechBro bad guys compete with the real things? Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, all have egomaniacal plots for domination that would make Blofeld drop his white cat and say, “Whoa! Dudes! Chill the fuck out!” Nicholas Hoult and Jesse Eisenberg couldn’t make Lex Luthor more psychopathic than Larry Ellison. So… why bother?

The reason the original Tron holds up is that it was, and in many ways still is, ahead of the curve. “Cyberspace” in the sense we now understand it to be, wasn’t in wide parlance until William Gibson’s Neuromancer, published two years after Tron came out in 1982. Back then, I thought the conceit of people having digital doppelgangers in an electronic environment was just a dumb Wizard of Oz riff. Now everybody has avatars in the Cloud, which was engineered by nerds who were probably inspired by Tron.

Tron: Ares feels way behind the curve. Real-life TechBro supervillains. AI that dreams and poses an actual threat to human beings (people are dying because of their interactions with ChatBots). Corporate warfare. Ghosts in the machine of real people haunting digital realms. Tron: Ares can’t compete with reality, and it hasn’t the heft needed to comment, with any power, on our current reality.

Tron: Ares ends with a postcard being sent. This movie is a postcard of the truly great SciFi movie it could have been with more patience, artistry, and trust. A snapshot of something that should have been a great time.

To this day, novelist, writing coach, and personal trainer Michael Marano regrets as a teen paying to see Tron at the Amherst Theater in Buffalo, then sneaking in to see The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, the ticket sales of which raised money for Amnesty International. He has since donated to Amnesty International to atone for this. (www.BluePencilMike.com)