Director: Joachim Rønning
Stars: Jodie Turner-Smith, Greta Lee, Jared Leto
I absolutely love a bit of ‘Tron’ if, by ‘Tron’, you mean the opening track of the 2004 dark ambient album Morals and Dogma by Norwegian experimentalist Deathprod. But as for the sporadic Disney IP about competitive computer programs buzzing bikes around a digital playground… colour me non-committal. It seems to me as though Joseph Kosinski’s dull 2010 follow-up to the mediocre 1982 original is mostly remembered for some sleek aesthetics and Daft Punk soundtrack. And that Joachim Rønning’s ambitions for his third film in the series don’t extend much further.
While it sets it’s sights (kinda inevitably) on zeitgeisty topics like the prevalence of AI, the main question TRON: Ares promotes is just why #MeToo-dodging charm void Jared Leto is still getting cast in things? The off-putting actor has a baffling track record of tanking potentially viable movies, and so it goes again here. Leto ‘stars’ as the titular program Ares, ‘Master Controller’ for boy-tyrant corporate CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters). Things are going fine so long as Leto doesn’t have to emote, but Ares hinges on his evolution from AI drone to proto-person. Humanity, it seems, isn’t something Leto is suited to expressing. He’s not the only reason that TRON: Ares ultimately fails, but he’s a big part of it.
Credit where it’s due, writers David DiGilio and Jesse Wigutow have attempted to mix-up the formula some and release TRON from it’s self-constructed prison of liminal digital matrixes. Where previously we dove down the rabbit hole into the computer world, Ares pitches a tech race between Dillinger’s evil corporation and Eve Kim’s (Greta Lee) ‘good’ corporation to give AI constructs physical form in our world. The technology exists… too bad for them it only last for 29 minutes at a time. Thus the ‘Permanence Code’ has become a Holy Grail that the two CEOs are chasing. Julian wields Ares like a weapon, keen to use the tech to make billions from military contracts, but his program is evolving and has desires on immortality himself…
The 29-minute conceit is quite easily the best element of TRON: Ares, as it adds a suspenseful drive to the repeated efforts by Julian to nab the Permanence Code from Eve with the help of his robo-henchmen. In effect what Rønning has made is a new Terminator movie swaddled in the lore of another franchise. Once Ares has gone rogue (no one has ever gone rogue as blandly as Leto), these duties fall to the more driven Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), who manages to underpin her supposed passivity with a relentless righteous fury. She makes for a pretty good baddie, certainly more-so than Peters’ whiny Dillinger. Poor Gillian Anderson is left with almost nothing to do except whisper gravely in Peters’ ear.
After the iconic Daft Punk, Rønning needed a pretty good get for soundtrack duties. Ares nabs Nine Inch Nails for a propulsive mix of industrial techno cuts, though the film wobbles hard when it tries to turn pure music video for a Massive Attack style number in the middle. There’s also an exceeding grating choice to make Ares’ one discernible characteristic a passionate love of Depeche Mode. Leto handles it badly, but it’s a lamentable choice to begin with. Not because of Depeche Mode. But because it feels like a half-hearted tilt toward a different kind of film, like the insinuation of a romantic connection between Ares and Eve that Leto doesn’t have the skills for, or all the withering franchise Easter eggs dotted about the place. Just fuck off and get on with it.
With the full force of Disney behind him, Rønning can at least ensure that his movie looks the business, and it does. Dillinger’s signature black-with-red-piping is pretty gorgeous, and the way that the bikes create physical slipstreams that impede traffic is pretty nifty (if downright ridiculous). But it increasingly feels as though the main concern here is for the movie to showcase a new range of toys and action figures. It’s hard to shake off the emptiness of this proposition, even if it does woo with some brief thrills and stark eye candy. Predictably, perhaps, the movie is far too sympathetic toward AI; your only options are the kind that makes trees or the kind that makes weapons. The whole feels like the tech-bro argument that begins with “AI is here to stay”. Yeah, but what if it wasn’t? There’s no voice for that here.
Pre-empting streaming passivity, the script takes great pains to repeat most plot information at least once, assuming the viewer is either stupid or not paying attention. The result of which is the feeling that it’s the movie itself that isn’t that smart, isn’t that confident. By the time the third act hurtles into some suspicious Transformers-style bullshit, that initial feeling that the material has been refreshed itself transforms into a suspicion that it doesn’t have a new leg to stand on, and is just pulling from other franchises for support.
Ultimately the best efforts of Greta Lee and Jodie Turner-Smith can’t make up for the vortex of awful emanating outward from Jared Leto. God of war? God of bores, more like. The mid-credits wrap-up makes it very clear that – like all Disney franchise properties at the moment – the intention is to keep going, keep making more, keep the production line turning. So long as Leto and (to a lesser extent) Peters are the driving forces behind that future, TRON can’t possibly muster up consumer enthusiasm. Like AI it may be forging ahead with unstoppable momentum, but we’re in danger of losing the human factor and, in the process, any semblance of a reason to remain engaged.
Ironically, this would all have probably made a much better video game.
The Lost Highway Hotel 