Producers: Sean Bailey, Jared Leto, Emma Ludbrook, Jeffrey Silver, Justin Springer and Steven Lisberger Director: Joachim Rønning Screenplay: Jesse Wigutow Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Cameron Monaghan, Gillian Anderson and Jeff Bridges Distributor: Disney
Grade: C-
Nostalgia can’t justify “Tron: Ares,” the third movie in the Disney franchise that began with the groundbreaking CGI showcase of 1982 and then went moribund until 2010, when the sequel “Tron: Legacy” was released. Both films, about humans drawn into the digital Grid, a realm of virtual realities, as embodiments of the computer programs they’d created, were visually impressive but dramatically flat, little more than feature-length catenae of chases and battles. (An animated TV series of 2012-13 proved a dud.)
What, beside the profit motive, possessed Disney to make another sequel after the passage of another decade and a half? Certainly not the inane script, replete with characters so one-dimensional that they give cardboard a bad name and dialogue so clichéd that it’s hard to suppress a giggle while they’re spouting it. Not to mention a plot that can justly be described as infantile.
It centers on the inevitable MacGuffin, a computer code devised by the legendary Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) that can extend the life of computer-generated things, be they people, trucks or trees, beyond a twenty-nine-minute span after they’re transplanted into the “real” world, at the close of which they crumble to dust. The code has been hidden away for decades.
Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters, a talented actor reduced to playing a snarling comic-book villain here, the techno-dweeb with delusions of omnipotence) is the grandson of the evil guy played by David Warner in the original film. He’s just succeeded his mother (Gillian Anderson, all prune-faced snootiness) as president of Dillinger Systems and is determined to secure this so-called Permanence Code. His chief instrument is Ares (Jared Leto, impassive and dull, though appropriately smoldering in his shiny black-and-red body suit), the Master Control entity he controls in the Grid.
Julian’s in competition with Eve Kim (Greta Lee), the CEO of Flynn’s old employer ENCOM. Grieving the death of her twin sister, Eve resumes her sibling’s search for the elusive code, an effort that takes her to an abandoned station in remote Alaska with her annoyingly snarky aide Seth (an obnoxious Arturo Castro). Rifling through a box of old floppy discs, she finds the code. But Julian learns of the discovery and sends Ares, his second-in-command Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith, buff but boringly fierce) and their cohort to retrieve the file, cuing the first of several protracted motorbike chases suffused with bands of red laser exhaust.
You know whom you’re meant to root for in this corporate fracas. Eve, inheriting her sister’s do-gooder impulses, intends using the code to grow imperishable orange groves, apparently to supply endless doses of Vitamin C to all, while Julian’s goal is to cultivate a crop of super-soldiers.
Eve destroys the file before Ares can take her prisoner and brought into the Grid, but when Julian learns that the code still lingers inside her, he orders Ares to extract it even if it means her death. That engages a sense of empathy in Ares and he goes rogue, escaping with Lee and helping her evade Julian’s army, now led by Athena. In the ensuing action Ares, who’s somehow coming to have a human side (the script itself alludes to both Frankenstein and Pinocchio) makes a detour into the ancient area of the Grid (he calls it “classic”), where he converses with an aging Flynn. During their talk he expresses a preference for Depeche Mode over Mozart, proving beyond any doubt his transformation is still in its infancy, but Flynn, whom Bridges gives a dudish Lebowski vibe, approves of the guy and his mission.
There follows yet more massive destruction as Athena, who also escapes Julian’s control, wages unrestrained war on Kim, her corporate colleagues Seth and Ajay Singh (Hasan Minhaj), and, of course, Ares. No points for predicting who comes out on top, but much bloodless carnage in the streets is necessary before the decision is reached; and even then an inter-credits scene suggests that the battle is not yet over—a scrappy survivor indicates a sequel may be in the offing. One can only hope it will take another fifteen years to gestate.
Though “Ares” does neither its cast nor its audience any favors, it does allow an army of visual artists the opportunity to strut their stuff. The team led by visual effects supervisor David Seager and production designer Darren Gilford have done a fine updating of the sleek look of the previous films, costume designers Alix Friedberg and Christine Bieselin Clark trot out tight spandex duds for the AI fighters, and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth decks it all out in a glossy package. Unfortunately, Tyler Nelson’s editing allows many sequences—the cycle changes in particular—to run on too long (when one spends so much on effects it’s hard to jettison any of them), and the score by Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) is, especially in the IMAX format, insanely loud, and compounded by an equally relentless sound design. The result does, to be sure, have the benefit of drowning out some of the puerile dialogue, but it’s still mighty oppressive.
Disney and director Joachim Rønning have gone out of their way to satisfy devotees who turned the previous “Tron” movies into cult favorites, and as an exercise in fan service “Ares” fills the bill. But by any objective standard it’s a supremely silly, if good-looking, hunk of cartoonish sci-fi.