The Good:
Visually Stunning. The art department was absolutely on point and they earned every penny of their pay and more.
Remarkably, Jared Leto’s acting is not generally at fault, though I’m not sure his overly talky moments were *intended* for him to sound like an overly verbose LLM, but they definitely did.
Jeff Bridges is in it. Unfortunately his role in it is both small and raises questions and inconsistencies.
The Bad:
Characterizations are remarkably shallow, and the attempts to deepen them feel shallower. Ares transition from cold calculating program to empathetic hero is like a light switch, and the visual shorthand of him absorbing Eve’s human moments is over in way less time than it should, considering the movie is stacking the job of *his* lightspeed emotional growth on top of the job of informing *us* about Eve’s emotional stakes. Jaret Leto’s ham handed armchair therapizing her about it is about as ham handed as it gets. I’d really rather have my exposition in a text crawl before I get it like the movie delivers it. Eve herself gives up any meaningful agency as soon as Ares is on screen. Its the Jared Leto show and it knows it.
I cannot recall where the idea originated, but there is a worldbuilding idea that says that the unreal parts of your world need to be able to withstand three levels of scrutiny, IE, I should be able to ask three questions, each digging deeper into a particular aspect of your lore. EX: How does a star trek warp drive work?
Layer 1: It creates a warp bubble around the ship which stretches the space in front of and compresses the space behind the ship, causing superluminal speed.
Layer 2: The warp field is generated when power from a matter antimatter reaction is funneled into the warp core
Layer 3: Dilithium crystals regulate the matter/antimatter reaction to allow stable energy transfer to the warp core
Star Trek is well built enough that you can go deeper, but the idea is that if you explain something three levels deep, it allows suspension of disbelief to be maintained because your imagination wont bother to reach further to know something is wrong.
Depending on what part of Tron Ares we are looking it, it fails at getting two levels deep, and often it fails at level one.
I’ll give a little leeway for how the particle laser works, because anyone who knows even the basics of matter energy conversion requirements has been screaming since the end of Tron Legacy, though if there is even *feasibility* about materializing a full human woman, then it breaks hard when we talk about, say, materializing a *skyscraper sized flying machine*
And that brings me to where this movie just looks at consistency in storytelling or. *physics* and says “Na brah. We don’t do that here”.
Tron and Tron:Legacy do a good part of their storytelling lifting by establishing that the events of the narrative happen inside the computer, where what we see is a metaphor of computer system operations made ‘physical’ but only really in the visual sense. The physical operations of ‘The Grid’ are representations of computer functions, so there are fantastical things that happen without triggering any disbelief in the viewer. We’re on the grid, go fuckin nuts. And while Tron Legacy *Hinted* at the possibility of Grid machines coming to the real world, it stopped short, with just a ‘We made a human” And was smart enough to leave that pandoras box of logical shitshows alone.
Tron Ares presents all those logical nightmares and more by having all the Grid Tech, when manifested, operate *exactly* as it does in the grid, but in the real world. Where we have Aerodynamics, and Newtonian Physics, and Special relativity, and Ares DOES NOT GIVE ONE FUCK about any of it. Skyscraper sized floating parentheses, vehicles of all shapers and sizes that produce physically tangible (and destructive) ribbons of light with no regard for energy to matter conversion requirements. I desperately wanted to scream at the screen, but there were two whole other people in the theater and I did respect their experience more than I did this disregard for sane depictions of physics.
Ok, I’m taking a breath. Lets do something lighter
Trent Reznor’s score is ok, but he’s eclipsed by the audio masterpiece that was Daft Punk in Tron: Legacy. I think there's a possible version of this movie where the more raw synthetics add a delicious instability to the proceedings, but even then, it was never going to match Daft Punk perfection.
I think that overall, what the film does in essentially every aspect, is create more questions than it answers, while also making near zero effort to meaningfully connect itself to either of the previous movies. Sam Flynn and Quorra, are not addressed beyond lazy write outs. Kevin Flynn appears in the movie, and the movie actively avoids addressing what happened to him at the conclusion of Tron:Legacy. The visual style is, again, absolutely top tier, but the visual language is not supported by narrative consistency with itself or previous entries in the series.
2 stars
