'Tron: Ares'-Didn't Need to Happen, But Light-cycled Well

 

Tron: Ares poster. Courtesy of Disney.

Tron: Ares was a sequel that didn't need to happen, but light-cycled well, anyway. From Jared Leto humanizing another Dillinger-brand living weapon to the gumption from Greta Lee to the amazing special effects to the great industrial and electronic scoring by Nine Inch Nails, it did a little justice to the original 1982 classic.

Years after Tron: Legacy, rather than just bringing humans into the computer, ENCOM founder Ed Dillinger's grandson Julian, played by Evan Peters, sets up an AI named Ares, played by Jared Leto, as part of a plan to bring living technology into the real world. Unfortunately, under Julian's authority, those programs can only last a few minutes in the real world, but he's determined not to let that stop him from becoming a powerful tech billionaire. Ares teams up with ENCOM CEO Eve Kim, played by Greta Lee, to take down Julian and another rogue program named Athena, played by Jodie Turner-Smith.

Ares opened with a darker tone than the original film, complete with somewhat menacing music by Nine Inch Nails. Then it bounced from dark to funny between Ares overcoming Julian's programming to references to past items such as a floppy disk or Eve's love of Depeche Mode.

On Leto, I've only seen him as the Joker up till now, but I think he gave a decent performance in that he wanted to be a machine for good, help Eve get over some personal trauma and live his 29 minutes on a good soul rather than use a Light Cycle for gladiator matches or something. Leto was cool and remote in speech, pretty much as robotic as his character, but he grows on you towards the end. He also showed some good kung fu or capoeira when fighting rogue programs. He had the original bad guy programming of Terminator mixed with the sullen eyes of Clubber Lang and the soul of Iron Giant. He has also has a bit of Ultron in him with scanning the Internet for stuff about Dillinger, Kim, etc.

If not Leto, you'll really love Lee. Her character of Eve was like an adrenaline junkie between snowmobile riding in Alaska to battling Athena and Ares on light cycles through Los Angeles. Great job, stunt team. And you'll love her empathy and determination outside of fighting.

Compared to his wild and friendly time as Quicksilver from the younger X-Men films, Peters as Julian was kind of like Ed from the original film. His performance was like Ed being the whole cold and calculating, ruthless guy-in-a-chair, just in the image of a millennial tech billionaire. Even though he wasn't very physical, you could kind of compare him to Syndrome from Incredibles.

Characters aside, you'll also appreciate the visual effects, such as the LA light cycle chase that actually shows a police car getting sliced by one of the bad guys, or Space Paranoids vehicles entering downtown LA, or the landscape of the Grid looking similar to Macau from Skyfall or something. There's also some cool nods to the original Tron such as digitizing an orange or Flynn's arcade or Dumont, good humor moments such as Eve saying "Still majored in English lit" when she got mixed up with the Ares crisis or Ares himself saying "I find 80s pop invigorating", and just the big science fiction between coding and digitizing people.

I give it a 7.8/10. Despite the part of me that feels the original Tron should've been left alone, it was good to see its premise still has some relevance today.