Tron: Ares
Every day I am astounded by the rise of geekdom. I jump on a teams call where the odds are high that someone will be surrounded by marvel gear. Flaunting how they double my annual paycheck, not with a rolex, but with a replica of Tony Stark's helmet on their shelf. When I was 16 in 2010, I remember marveling at the beginnings of this movement. Iron man just broke ground in the genre and people were now openly into comic book lore and poring over after credit scenes. Call of Duty and Halo had made playing online games mandatory as the new after school meet up place was on Xbox Live. Netflix had just pushed the hyper popular Attack on Titan to everyone's home and Anime was no longer an eye rolling concept to bring up. Today, these things are not just trendy, they are cultural hard hitters as well as monetary juggernauts for the companies that produce them.
I bring this up only to bring awareness to how much “Nerd Culture” has drastically changed in the public eye since 1982 and Tron was released. In contrast, being nerdy was counter culture. Tabletop RPGs were demonized, comic books were brain rot, and computers were dense and difficult to use products that only true to god hobbyists kept until the later half of the decade. Tron is born from this. It's a bizarre attempt at visualizing the inside workings of a computer. It borrows from gaming and computing trends at the time and fails miserably to make them relatable because they simply weren’t.
Arriving in 2025. Nerd culture and tech is no longer in a sweet spot between hobbyism and mainstream appeal. It is the mainstream. People have been through over a decade of the IP era of film and television. The sentiment is one of complacency instead of excitement. The nerds of the 1980s and 90s have quickly become some of the most powerful and influential businessmen we have ever seen. Ushering in a new gilded age of billionaires off of the back of user data and exploitative algorithms. Tron: Ares, opposed to the original Tron, is born of this new era of sickness from tech. Opposition to social media scrolling, fear of AI learning models, and most of all a resentment to the tech CEOs who rake in absurd wealth running these platforms. In honesty this could provide an interesting backdrop for a Tron movie. Tech has become dystopian and there are incredibly interesting ideas to explore right now. Disney however, stood atop its mountain of gold and made a unilateral decision to neuter this movie. Veteran Tron writer Steven Lisberger is still at the helm, but it's impossible to watch this movie and not smell the studio interference rising off the script. I seriously wonder if his name only appears as a pleasantry while a studio writing room went crazy. The entire cultural zeitgeist that we’ve covered seems to have been either ignored or intentionally ducked to avoid controversy. The result is this empty void of a movie, lacking purpose and refusing to enter the discussion when posing interesting ideas.
The central crux of Ares is “The permanence code” which is quite literally the holy grail. As the world has somehow figured out how to 3D print actual life from The Grid into reality with the caveat that it typically gets derezzed after a small period of time. The permanence code does exactly what you’d think, it makes that life permanent in our world. The first example we are given is a fruit tree. Given permanence, it instantly becomes a source of food directly from the grid. This is astounding as the implications here are so vast for the world. This idea presented so clearly at the beginning of the film taints the entire movie. This code would grant a world free from hunger, sickness, and potentially death completely. Part of the emptiness of this new movie is this lack of public reaction to such absurd new concepts. There are no meetings about the implications of such a thing, no difficult conversations over ethical use or if it should even exist. Instead the code is relegated to a mcguffin for an evil tech CEO who wants it solely to build an army of neon men. Pitted against a good CEO who has such a shallow goal of just wanting it because her late sister worked on it. At a point I thought maybe the movie would try to dabble with the protagonist resurrecting her sister via AI. Something that could be interesting as it brings about questions of AI vs human life. But they never bite on this, and in exchange we get a protagonist who feels completely irrelevant and more lifeless than the actual AI character.
Why Disney opted for a tech CEO to be both our hero and villain is just another bizarre touch. Even if Eve, the good guy CEO, had an actual motive or character trait. There is simply no way it doesn’t come off as tone deaf in this day and age. Even before the time of Elon Musk, Tron seemed to understand this. Both Flynns in Tron and Legacy are underdogs against this sea of greedy board room members. They care about the tech and the worlds within them, opposed to others who can only see the monetary value of it. Eve’s motives just never develop so she simply is downgraded to a helper role to Ares on his quest to become human. Her small cast of comic relief friends only really add to the frustration. They might as well be AI characters designed to vomit out a Marvel quip at the correct time. Eve’s situation is so unique and absurd, the power of god on a thumb drive, but no one around her drives the conversation around it ever. At one point I got excited watching her partner eat a fruit off of a 3D printed tree. Thinking it might poison him and push further questions about what is possible. But you already know that this movie would never even dare to dig into its own philosophies. Dr. Evil Dillenger CEO is just as mundane. His entire company is hinged on getting the permanence code to print off tanks and soldiers like a neon lockheed martin. But it’s just so pointless. The permanence code is a god particle, the stakes are so much higher than guns and tanks. Who cares about having AI soldiers when the implications of this device could make you a literal deity? We never go crazy in this movie and it's maddening. Talk about 3D printing a hydrogen bomb, or how you would literally control the flow of food and water all over the planet. The limits are infinite with this thing and we can’t get over this 2000s era soldiers without borders PMC obsession.
I’ll finally talk about Jared Leto. It’s the closest the movie comes to asking interesting questions. But it's such a contrived Pinocchio story. The AI gets mad at his creator mainly because he's kind of mean to him. Why does the AI even start to respond to emotions? According to the movie it's because he got to touch rain once and it changed him. The movie won’t dive any further into this. Ares goes on a quest to humanize himself, which really just plays out like Terminator 2 as Eve teaches him common phrases and gets him infatuated with Depeche Mode. These new phrases, a newfound love of 80s pop, and encouragement from nostalgia bait Jeff Bridges is enough to just flip the switch for Ares. He’s willing to give up immortality to be a human in the real world. And that just works, no one questions it, the logistics are never ironed out. Ares gets to just ride off on a motorcycle at the end with no consequences or trade offs. All this really achieves is making his arc just as empty as the other characters. While once again not answering or posing any thoughtful ideas about the world.
All of this just contributes to nothingness. A void of potential ideas, thoughts, and characters that no one was brave enough to develop. Tron is a franchise full of big ideas and Ares just wants to use the setting as dressing for an action movie with no good action. Baiting you with nostalgia for the 80s. The Akira slide shows up in almost every movie but it made me sick seeing it in this. Everything down to the Depeche Mode reference just feels incredibly bad faith. I can’t recommend this movie to anyone because it's not for any specific person. Tron: Ares takes a cult classic and strip mines the IP. Creating nothing but a real world remake of Harold and the Purple Crayon except the crayon is red.
Months before watching Tron: Ares. I went to see my first Disney “live action” remake in Lilo and Stich, a personal favorite of mine from growing up. Coming out of a remake that was not only bad, but had robbed the life of the original, made me wonder how or why this had been made. Tron: Ares made me realize that this isn’t a bug, it's a feature. I lay awake at night now wondering how the snake feels as it slides its own tail into its mouth. Where does its mind go as his own head inches closer?