TRON: Ares - Review: As Alive As You Need Me To Be

It's funny that, as iconic as the film's visuals and aesthetics are, “TRON” as a franchise has almost always been the black sheep of the Disney IP factory. The original film made some decent money at the box office, but it took almost thirty years for a sequel in the form of “TRON Legacy.” Despite the deluge of merchandise seeming to signal a new age for the franchise, the modest box-office success resulted in Disney putting the series on ice for yet another extended period. Which is why it’s taken fifteen years and quite the development hell to bring “TRON: Ares” to fruition.

Set years after the events of “Legacy,” the film follows Eve Kim, played by Greta Lee (“The Morning Show,” “Past Lives”), the CEO of ENCOM as she searches for the “permanence code,” a piece of code written by Kevin Flynn years prior. At the same time, rival CEO of Dillinger Systems Julian Dillinger, played by Evan Peters (“Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past”), is also after the code and has decided to bring his highly advanced security software Ares, played by Jared Leto (“Suicide Squad,” “Dallas Buyers Club”), into the real world. He sends Ares and Athena, played by Jodie-Turner Smith (“After Yang,” “Anne Boleyn”), in search of Kim and the code, allowing whoever gets it first to bring their creations from the virtual world known as The Grid to the real world, permanently.

For better or worse depending on who you ask, “Ares” has been a Jared Leto project from the jump. His face has been on almost all the marketing, and he even has a producer credit on the final project. His performance therefore seems like even more of a lynchpin than it otherwise would; he's not just the lead character, but the reason the film exists. It’s somewhat anticlimactic then to learn that his performance is just fine. It’s completely serviceable. He does a good job with the more mechanical, cold aspects of the character, but the moment the film tries to push for some kind of an evolved emotion from Ares, Leto is reduced to hammy, wooden community theater acting.

The rest of the cast fares far better though. Lee is doing the best she can with the material she’s given, and she manages to turn out a pretty good performance as a result. Peters is surprisingly great as the villainous little brat running Dillinger Systems, and Smith is fantastic, stealing virtually any scene she’s in with menace and a smirk. Beyond that, the supporting cast is unfortunately filled with pretty forgettable side characters who seem to exist to say a half-decent bit of comedic relief or have the plot up until that point explained to them. Jeff Bridges (“The Big Lebowski,” “True Grit (2010)”) is back to reprise his role as Kevin Flynn in a far more interesting way than one might initially expect, and he does provide the film with a welcome shot in the arm. But he’s a borderline cameo, not a major supporting player in the cast.

A large reason that the supporting cast is so forgettable and where a lot of the film’s problems come from is the incredibly hit-or-miss script. Co-writers David DiGilio (“Eight Below,” “The Terminal List”) and Jesse Wigutow (“It Runs in the Family,” “Daredevil: Born Again”) stuff the film with far too many supporting characters that do virtually nothing substantial for the overall plot, as well as numerous concepts and subplots that have been well explored in other science fiction media over the last thirty years. From Ares learning how to “be human” to the idea of a true directive, it's all hashed up and glued back together in ways that don’t add anything new to the conversation. It doesn’t help that, again, Leto’s performance makes the film’s big emotional moments fall flat, and there are even a handful of moments where he recaps the plot and what the central emotional theme is to the camera, as if he’s stating things after the film has come back from a commercial break.

Which makes it all the more confusing that one of the biggest ideas of the film itself, what to do with the permanence code, is one of its coolest and most fascinating. It’s by far the most interesting part of the film, and it's a lasso that director Joachim Rønning (“Maleficent: Mistress of Evil,” “Kon-Tiki”) uses to keep the audience’s attention. His direction excels in the numerous action sequences and effects heavy moments, while being simply serviceable in quieter moments. The crazy camerawork from cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (“The Social Network,” “Gone Girl”) is a reason to see the film alone, and like the previous “TRON” films, it's been conceived of as a “style over substance” affair instead of accidentally ending up as one.

That style is excellent when it’s allowed to thrive, but the film seems almost self-conscious about its origins and franchise. While the sequences within the Grid are gorgeous and inventive, they take up a fraction of the film. Not only are the scenes outside of the Grid far less interesting as a whole, but it feels like the film is almost apologizing for what it is. As if it’s “too cool” to spend too much time in the science-fiction world it made its name on. It means that the film is likely the most general audience friendly TRON film thus far, but it also robs a large chunk of the film of its identity.

With each frame of black and pulsing red stretching across the seemingly endless Grid landscapes to the contrast of bright flashing lights and colors against the real-world environments, the film is an insanely gorgeous feast for the senses. It’ll likely be the kind of proejct used to demo 4K TVs and home stereos for at least the next decade, thanks to the visuals being matched with a pulsing, grinding, crunchy original score from Nine Inch Nails. It looks so cool and sounds so cool, so instantly transporting that it almost helps make up for the film’s cliched, routine, overstuffed story. Almost.

While getting a new “TRON” film made starring the likes of Greta Lee and Evan Peters, shot by Jeff Cronenworth, with a Nine Inch Nails score and all the visual sumptuousness that a $180 million budget can afford seems like a dream come true, when you then mix it with a wonky creative team and an actor as polarizing as Jared Leto, you start to see where the monkey’s paw has curled its finger. While certainly not a disaster, it's not hard to see a better version of this film somewhere in another Grid. As it stands, it’s the most audience friendly “TRON” film yet and die-hard fans will gladly eat it up. But waiting another fifteen years for something just “good” shouldn’t be seen as a victory. Like one of the tracks from the soundtrack states, Disney seems to have pushed this one out just to keep the franchise “as alive as you need me to be.” 3/5