(courtesy IMP Awards)
Movie trilogies are often, though not always, governed by the wholly unforgiving law of diminishing returns.
What was vital and fresh in the first film becomes diluted though often still appealing in the second film all of which means that by the third instalment, there is a strong sense of an idea photocopied to within a wafer-thin inch of its creative life.
But while that is often true, it is, as noted, not always a hill upon which the storytelling of trilogies lives and dies, and as exhibit A for the subjective truth of this gloriously generalistic statement, I give you Tron: Ares, the third film in a series which began in 1982 with Tron and which continued on, not as successfully though still watchably, in Tron: Legacy.
While you could argue its storyline is no more expansive or substantial than the much-pilloried Legacy, Joachim Rønning, working to a screenplay by Jesse Wigutow, takes the slight narrative and weaves something rather magically and imaginatively involving from it, offering up a film that doesn’t just dazzle with advanced blockbuster-worthy CGI but which forges a path that offers both a nod to what has come before in the trilogy while sending off on some very thoughtful and emotionally satisfying tangents.
In fact, while the previous two films in the franchise have offered some societal and technological critiques, it is Tron: Ares which really puts the pedal to the glowing back and red AI-birthed motorcycle (which give off more than a few Fast & Furious vibes) metal and takes a good, long hard look at where technology is taking us and whether it’s a road we want to go down.
Having said that, if you’re looking for a treatise of the kind that The Atlantic might offer up in a good few thousand words or so than abandon al expectation of that; Tron: Ares is a blockbuster and very much clings to the epic sound, look and feel of the highly popular, box office sprawling movie artform.
However, in amongst the action which takes places both in the digital realm – there are two at work here: the 1982 Encom original in which Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) still resides, and the 2025 one created by Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the grandson of the reasonably inert human bad guy from Tron) – and rather winningly breaks out into the real world, or perhaps more appropriately, the human world, there is a great deal of humanity and heart & soul on display in a film which isn’t afraid to wear its heart very much on its sleeve.
Central to all this heart wearing is Ares (Jared Leto), a highly intelligent, ferociously intuitive program created by Julian Dillinger, who is as sociopathic as they come in and who gives his creations, such as Ares and his second-in-command Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), sweeping human-centric orders, forgetting how devastatingly literally his commands will be taken – who begins to question his programming in a way that hints at an emerging and powerfully expressed humanity.
We’ve seen this kind of humanistic awakening in a program before in the Tron franchise, but Tron: Ares really takes this idea of humanity prevailing over programming, quite literally in this case, and run furiously hard with it, giving us an eponymous character who questions things so completely that he is willing to defy the ever more unhinged edicts of his creator and take steps to exercise considered morality over blind algorithmic obedience.
This takes the form of saving the grieving CEO of Encom, Eve Kim (Greta Lee), from some rather nefarious plots to take her into captivity, and worse, with the aim of taking from her a “permanence code” which will allow 3D outputs of a powerful AI brain – think tanks and soldiers for one, which is where Dillinger, you won’t be surprised to learn, is taking things; by way of contrast Kim wants wants to battle disease and inequity – to last longer in the human world than their current 29 minutes.
Having that kind of permanence of existence – although Ares and Kim later agree that it really should be an “impermanence code” since life is finite and while it’s longer than 29 minutes, do not go on forever – is a lucrative battleground worth fighting for, for Dillinger at least, and it’s what drives much of the pell-mell, hard-driving and visually enthralling action of Tron: Ares.
What makes Tron: Ares really stand out though, quite part from the deft way it weaves the franchise’s past into its current technologically wow-factor present, is how it puts humanity front and centre at the heart of everything it does.
That’s always been a focus of the franchise but this time it is much more explicit and thus much more affecting, and it means that while the film riffs on many of the same man vs technology themes of its predecessors, it does with a much empathetic, heartfelt and sometimes, yes, even funny focus.
This willingness to put humanity emphatically front and centre imbues Tron: Ares with a much more tangible sense of the human meeting the digital, helped along visually by the fact that much of the action takes places in our world which the digital can now enter, at least for a time (and maybe for much longer of the “permanence code” turns out to be as good as advertised.
In an age where AI is well and truly invading day-to-day life with very few questions being asked, at least by the people who can do something about it, if this is a good thing, Tron: Ares is not going to be the film to get the discussion going in earnest in the mainstream.
But it will start some sort of discussion if only because while AI is not explicitly put down in the film – to be fair, a number of the humans are more monstrously nuanced than their program will ever be – Tron: Ares always asks again and again, as does the franchise itself, whether for all its impressive bells and whistles, technology will only ever play second fiddle to humanity which, erratic though it might be, has the nimbleness and thoughtfulness to weather storms that perhaps the digital creations it has spawned are too inflexible to ever respond to in a way that guarantees long-term survival.
Oh and will there be a fourth film? Events in the credits hint that there will be and it could be a very interesting journey indeed as humanity careens into technology and unknowable things result …