Gravity or bad reviews can't stop me now
dir: Joachim Rønning
2025
I mean, three strikes, you’re out, surely?
The original Tron is not some beloved 80s sci fi flick; you couldn’t even say it’s a cult classic. It’s on the level of the mostly forgotten Disney stuff from ages ago like The Shaggy D.A. about a human cursed to be a dog, or, even worse, a dog cursed to be a human, or Hervey the Love Bug. It’s stuff that exists but no-one really cares about it. It’s not some rich resource to keep mining, to warrant continuing to return to the well.
Tron was and still is a pretty silly film about a guy who gets sucked into a computer and discovers a funky world where people fling these disks at each other and ride on light cycles. Lots of strong colours, and the ‘real’ world being replicated in the electronic world with easily vanquished bad guys and lots of blue neon everywhere.
Blue means ‘good’, red means ‘evil’.
Jeff Bridges played a guy who gets sucked into the computer world. He’s not even the main character. Tron is. It’s in the name, Tron’s the hero, played by the great Bruce Boxleitner. Now that’s a name you don’t hear often enough.
Anyway, it was a pretty cheesy kids movie. I was a kid. I liked cheese. I watched a copy of Tron taped off of the telly squillions of times, and then I presumably got bored of it. It holds no special place in my nerdy heart.
And then for some baffling reason they made a sequel called Tron Legacy in 2010, which is a terrible, terrible movie with great visuals, a banging soundtrack and nothing but terrible narrative and acting choices.
It didn’t do that well. More people got the soundtrack (by which I mean illegally downloaded) because it was great, and by Daft Punk, and not because they liked the movie.
The script, the dialogue? It was terrible, like, genuinely terrible. There’s an actual line of dialogue where Jeff Bridges says “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!”
Instead of pretending this was a wonderland inside a computer that looked vaguely like what the inside of computers look like, this flick conjectured a cyberspace realm called The Grid which is just some kind of digital fantasy realm where Jeff Bridges is an evil program but also a wizard.
Why would you make a sequel to that? Well, because, I dunno, familiarity?
I don’t think I’ve met anyone that’s seen the first two movies, so who did Disney imagine was clamouring for a third…
Well, it turns out, as quite often happens to me when I come to a horrible realisation about these kinds of questions, depressingly it turns out to be me. Sad sack middle aged men who remember the original with some misplaced fondness.
Tron Ares is a film just as profoundly dumb as the sequel, but it kinda works. It helps that it has in it people I like. Greta Lee is great in most things she’s ever been in, and it doesn’t matter that this flick doesn’t engage with her acting abilities that much. She plays a main role here as a… tech company CEO. Hasan Minaj and Arturo Castro, both stand-up comedians more than actors, offer able support to her in this flick, and hopefully in life. Minaj especially, considering his stage persona, perfectly fills that boisterous niche of a tech bro on stage announcing whatever.
In this flick, even more than the other flicks, the digital realm which only exists on servers is an alternative world just waiting to burst out into this, the ‘real’ world. The direction of the other flicks has been reversed. Instead of people accidentally being sucked into the digital realm, now it’s trying to make its way out, to infect our world with its trickery.
Story-wise, intellectually, this is dumber than dogshit. So much of what happens in this flick is nonsense even by the standards of your usual dumb sci fi flick. But visually, in terms of what they make happen and whether it looks cool or not, well, yes, it does look very cool.
An evil CEO, as if there are any other kinds of CEOs, seeks a code, a so-called permanence code, which would allow him to take things out of the digital realm, bring them into the ‘real’ world, but then exist indefinitely to do his bidding. What is his bidding? Evil stuff, probably. That evil CEO (Evan Peters) has an evil mother (Gillian Anderson, continuing to do her Maggie Thatcher impression from The Crown), so of course he’s only going to do dumb shit to the world.
For whatever reason he has a program called Ares (Jared Leto) that is like a super techno soldier in the digital world, and another one called Athena (Jodi Turner-Smith), who’s like him but presents as female. Evil tech guy uses just these two as especial enforcers of his will, go here, still this, kill that etc. If these programs get “hurt” in techno world, they are recreated at some point. If they come into the real world, they fall apart after 29 minutes.
If they’re given a command, at first, they have to do whatever evil guy says. And then they decide, yeah nah, not doing what you say anymore. Ares changes “his” mind after seeing Eve, Greta Lee’s character, behave with a modicum of concern and empathy towards some other character. Compassion, that’s what convinces him to go against his programming. And Athena? She turns more evil when she gets jealous when she sees Ares behaving compassionately towards Eve. Jealousy, that’s what convinces her to try harder to kill Eve and eventually bring a giant space ship type thingie into the real world of Seattle in order to kill Eve and everything she holds dear.
Eve, thanks to her dead sister, who motivates everything she does in the film because otherwise she’d just be doing random shit for no good reason, finds the permanence code, so they try to drag her into the digital realm to extract it from her, but Ares isn’t done surprising us.
Ares falls in love not just with compassion but with Depeche Mode. Most of his dialogue in the film is about Depeche Mode. Jared Leto delivers all of this dialogue about Depeche Mode without moving his teeth. I don’t know what it’s called in the acting world, or if Daniel Day Lewis would do it for a character, but nothing he says sounds like there’s any space between his teeth as he’s talking.
Depeche Mode… like, I guess they were a popular band back in the day? Gosh, they had some very catchy songs. Ultimately, Ares, a formerly hostile AI, now thinks humans are worth not exterminating because Depeche Mode is cool, and so once he bumps into yet another version of Flynn (Jeff Bridges), he is given the power to just be a person in the real world.
So I guess he has to get health cover, pay taxes, watch his cholesterol, clip his toenails, all the good stuff now. I am sure he can also, once he gets a job (in this economy?) he can buy all of the Depeche Mode albums on vinyl and listen to them in his bedsit. What would a salty AI now turned mortal do in our world? No idea, whatever he wants I guess. There’s no doubt they want another sequel, and ordinarily I would say there is no fucking way this flick, which is probably one of the biggest bombs of the year, will get another sequel, but I don’t think money works the same way it used to anymore.
A lack of interest at the box office, a lack of ticket sales, a complete lack of positive or even middling reviews, not making even the marketing budget back – these are no impediments to making more movies. Disney, or eventually the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund that will purchase most of the film studios including Disney, have no problem endlessly reprising existing IP, because the thing they don’t want is to ever create anything new. Something new, something not familiar, would somehow be too risky.
Even stuff that was never that popular in any sense of the word.
Look, I enjoyed it, but I’m nowhere near enough delusional to think that that makes it an even vaguely competent flick. All it has is a strong visual aesthetic, some great CGI stuff (like the motorbike / light cycle dual on the streets of Seattle), which looks pretty amazing, and another strong Atticus Finch / Trent Reznor / Nine Inch Nails type soundtrack. It’s not even a great soundtrack album, it sounds entirely tossed off, like an afterthought, but it’s perfectly techno-ey for the ultimate techno-ey adventure.
I don’t even know if kids would like it, maybe some of the dumber ones, who knows, I’m not going to ask them. I mean think of all the legal troubles I could get into if I wandered up to some kids and said “Hey, you look pretty dumb, what did you think of the Tron: Ares movie?” If mothers and stay-at-home dads still used handbags I’d expect a good walloping.
Everyone does flat or sub-pantomime style acting, and that’s fine for this kind of stuff. This is a paycheck, plus actors never know when the next Matrix flick will go viral with the masses. I mean, anyone who read this script should have known what doggerel it would turn out to be, but come on, actors gotta make a living, don’t they?
Leto is the worst but even he couldn’t completely sink this flick for me. When they reach back into the catalogue, they don’t reference the second film, they go all the way back to the original, which was kind of hilarious! I laughed like a drain, whatever that phrase actually means. To see 2025 techno Ares in a setting with CGI trying to look like 45 years ago was awesome.
But nothing else needs to be thought about. If you wonder how they filled up all those hours of time, let me just say that a ‘crucial’ plot point depends on the good techbro company run by Eve constructing a tree using a particle laser, and imbuing it with permanence using her sister’s code, so that, using techno magic, they can create trees out of nothing. And it works, which means the world is saved, somehow, because 3D printers can somehow now make something out of nothing.
Don’t, don’t even scrunch your face up thinking about how dumb that is, it’s not worth it. Just remember cool bikes go fast, things blow up, all good.
6 times take me the Matrix I mean the Grid I mean cruel sea out of 10
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“Beware, for I am fearless, and therefore powerful” – its only good line is stolen from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - Tron: Ares
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