Tron: Ares

Tron: Ares follows Ares, a highly advanced AI from the digital world, who crosses into the human realm on a dangerous mission. A programmer named Eve, working on a groundbreaking project, encounters Ares and grapples with the consequences of AI merging with reality. As corporate forces and rogue programs collide, Ares questions its purpose, leading to a battle that could reshape both worlds.

Tron: Ares Review

The original Tron (1982) was a revolutionary film that showcased the creative spirit that Walt Disney Studios once dominated as it drove storytelling innovation for the rest of the world. Tron: Ares is the perfect metaphor for what The House of Mouse has become, a loud, creative blackhole that sucks all of the originality out of already tired and worn-out IPs with all of the skill and flair of driftwood.

                   

While Tron: Ares looks like a movie, the story is an incoherent and fragmented jumble of narrative buckshot, lazily mushed together with childishly bad and clichéd dialogue and helium gravitas. From its opening salvo of over-exposed red laser-light to its soulless and empty conclusion, there is not a single moment in which Ares’ story flows organically. Instead, it took TWO writers to piece together two hours’ worth of random events into something resembling a meaningful order.

Based on the trailers, one might think that at least Tron: Ares’ visuals would be worth buying a ticket. The deep contrast between black and the laser red signature Tron highlights made for some dramatic visuals when served up two minutes at a time. However, with only a single good idea among them, the filmmakers latched onto it like an inner city pitbull onto a neighbor, and the result is a scarlet onslaught that will leave you with protanopia.

Even the film’s sound is a mess. Each creatively bankrupt idea in the script is punctuated with overly loud melodramatic techno-tones as the cinematographer aggressively zooms in on faces delivering their indecipherable verbal pudding with digitally distorted voices. Then again, perhaps it was a stroke of genius for the sound editors to have made half of the dialogue unintelligible.

And while no performer could inject weightiness into a script as empty as this, between his never-changing blank stare in this, his laughable turn as Morbius, and whatever the h311 he was doing as the Joker in Suicide Squad, Jared Leto cements that his Oscar win for The Dallas Buyers Club was a fluke. The now 53-year-old may have made a pact with the devil for youthful looks, but the cost must have been talent along with his soul. In Tron: Ares, the L.A. native is a completely empty light suit.

Miss Tron: Ares with extreme prejudice.

WOKE REPORT

DEIgital

• Tron: Ares gives us both barrels with Strong-and-Independent-Woman-of-Color Number 1 AND Strong-and-Independent-Woman-of-Color Number 2 leading the film.
  • And yes, they are both girl bosses who inexplicably dominate the runtime.

Socially Responsible, Female-Owned, Locally Sourced

• Both the villains and the protagonists are chasing the same technology. However, the rich white male wants to use it to create super soldiers and unstoppable weapons of war, while the minority and female-owned one wants to make orange trees and medicine for the world.

Silly White Boy

• Once again, the comic relief is left to an inferior and awkward white boy who simps for Strong-and-Independent-Woman-of-Color Number 1.