Tron: Ares — a visually striking ride that struggles to capture the franchise's spark

style="font-weight: 400;">Tron: Legacy (2010), the film follows Eve Kim (played by Greta Lee), head of technology company ENCOM, who is racing to discover the secrets left behind by former programmer and company head Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges). 

Trying to keep up with Eve is Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), head of a rival firm and under the watchful eye of his mother Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson). In an attempt to get ahead of the competition, Dillinger dispatches a highly trained and dangerous computer program designated Ares (Jared Leto) into our reality.

Very quickly, worlds start to collide as Ares and Eve race to uncover Flynn’s secrets, while other programs, including Ares’s sinister second-in-command, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), wreak neon-drenched havoc, culminating in a battle between programs and users for the future of technology.

That synopsis may sound rather non-descriptive, but it is pretty accurate for what is, easily, the film’s most damaging defect. 

While valid criticism can be levelled against the previous outings for featuring weak storytelling and characters, Tron: Ares digs itself a deeper hole thanks to a derivative plot, which is the result of trying to reconcile the Tron mythos with humanity’s current relationship with technology.

Tron has always had a flavour of the fantastical, even exploring hard themes of religion in its depiction of an evocative but threatening world inside the computer. 

Alongside science fiction writers of the time, 1982’s Tron can actually be credited with predicting the advent of artificial intelligence and cloud computing, where all devices and systems interact with each other on a globally connected web. The original film is governed by that depiction: a place where programs ride around on cycles powered by light, traversing roads made of hardened pixels. 

2010’s Tron: Legacy fully understood that brief and the result was a movie duology that looks, sounds and feels like no other films that came before or after them.

Writer Jesse Wigutow’s attempt to tell a story about AI, self-actualisation and corporate greed, combined with director Joachim Rønning’s taking a more industrial and grounded approach to the material, leads to Tron: Ares losing its impact, and Tron distinctiveness. Even attempting to tap into nostalgia for the 1982 film by featuring Jeff Bridges isn’t enough. You lose a sense of escapism when the digital world of the Grid is just a server farm in a basement, and you’re watching two tech CEOs go to war over a piece of IP.

The character work isn’t much better in Tron: Ares. Both the motivations of Ares and Kim aren’t well defined, making them neither sympathetic nor compelling. The same can be said for the acting. Leto is being robotic on purpose, so he doesn’t need to exert himself, but Lee is given very little to work with. 

Hilariously, as it turns out with so many Disney films, the villains overshadow the heroes with their charisma and style, as Anderson and, especially, Peters deliver over-the-top but still sophisticated performances. 

The real standout of the film’s cast, though, is Turner-Smith, whose turn as the program Athena is clinical, ruthless and incredibly intimidating.

The big things that save Tron: Ares from the recycle bin are the things that always made the franchise great to experience on the big screen. Though it has to account for what the current computer age actually looks like, the film showcases visuals and an aesthetic that are entirely its own. 

Lifting people, vehicles and weapons out of the Grid and shifting them into reality makes for striking visuals and high-octane action scenes. Those scenes are also well paced, keeping the energy high throughout the film’s runtime.

Second to those visuals is the audio, with Tron: Ares boasting a soundtrack by