Sometimes, it’s hard not to feel bad for Jared Leto.
That’s not to compliment his acting in Tron: Ares, the latest entry in a sci-fi franchise that somehow manages to be simultaneously underserved and seriously bloated. It would be almost unfairly charitable to call this movie a rip-off of a hundred better AI-apocalypse films. Or, if we’re being extra generous, Pinocchio.
Because despite Leto playing the role of a malfunctioning computer program who evolves the ability to both experience empathy and, one assumes, buy lots and lots of hair mousse, it’s not his desire to be a real boy that inspires pity. It’s the fact that he so clearly and desperately wants to be considered an important, serious actor. But instead of earning it, he again and again shows up in movies like Suicide Squad, Morbius and, sadly, this.
To be fair, Tron: Ares is not quite as bad as Morbius, the painful joke of a film so bad it earned the half-believable fake tagline “It’s Morbin’ Time.” But taking the critical temperature, it’s possible the follow-up to 2010’s Tron: Legacy (itself a reboot of Tron, the video-game inspired 1982 film) may earn a similar reputation.
Already being hailed as among the worst big budget movies ever made, it’s almost incredible how disliked Leto’s foray into the universe of the modern cult-classic has become. And that’s even before audiences have gotten a chance to watch it.
A further shame, because Tron: Ares does not actually rise to the level of deserving love, hatred, or really any reaction at all stronger than bemused indifference.
It is far from the most offensively bad movie of the year (an honour that still goes to The Ritual). And it’s nowhere near the worst big budget effort (it may prove impossible to ever take that title from Megalopolis). Instead, the almost impressive blandness of Tron: Ares simply makes it one of the most forgettable.
WATCH | Tron: Aries trailer:
Ares picks up right where its predecessor Legacy ends. Or actually, the exact opposite of that. Because not only has more than a decade passed between the making of the two sequels, but basically every major character from Legacy has disappeared.
Where the original Tron followed a computer programmer dropped into The Grid, a sentient, fully populated digital world that he helped build, Legacy saw his son transported into that same action-packed world to track him down.
But Ares sets its sights on a different kind of protagonist. Instead of a plucky everyman, Ares chooses to make its hero the most beloved archetype of all: the billionaire tech CEO.
We follow Eve Kim (Greta Lee), head of Encom corporation, which — alongside rival Dillinger Systems — is at the forefront of AI research and innovation. Except Kim was never supposed to be a CEO. It was her beloved late sister who shepherded the company into the dominant position it’s in — an interesting character backstory, though it’s told entirely through clunky dialogue rather than being shown.
This is enough awkward exposition to suggest a missing movie (or three) between Legacy and Ares, and we still have significantly more to go. Because after The Grid revealed technological bounties, both Kim and her rival CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) realized the next step in human evolution would be found in cyberspace.
Both CEOs have figured out how to use The Grid as a virtually boundless resource that allows them to produce weapons, food and even bloodthirsty killing machines.
That includes Ares himself, the mindless “Master Control” program Dillinger has bet the future of his company on: a walking, talking weapon of mass destruction he can sell to the highest bidder.
The only problem? Anything printed from The Grid disintegrates in exactly 29 minutes. The only way around that is to find the “Permanence Code,” a movie MacGuffin suposedly created by the first film’s long-suffering main character, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges). That narrative hanger-on earns another cameo here, making him one of the franchise’s few remaining through-lines: representing a desperate and increasingly arbitrary thesis falling apart faster than the movie’s internal logic.
Add to that a complicated kidnapping strategy that temporarily strands Kim in The Grid. And mix in a suddenly good-guy Ares, complete with a futuristic motorbike and a monologue so reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger it’s hard to believe he didn’t end it with “Come with me if you want to live.”
Then bake with a robotic reverence for life plucked from I, Robot and a corporate superhero oligarch straight out of Elon Musk’s most self-serving daydreams. Voila, you have Tron: Ares. Or as I like to call it, Terminator 2: The Passion of Mark Zuckerberg.
This does ignore some of the benefits the movie offers, including sleek cinematography — though nearly the entire film takes place outside of the visually beautiful Grid, the main selling point of the franchise’s cinematic world.
There’s also the impressive Nine Inch Nails score, which is unfortunately still not quite as good as Daft Punk’s effort in Legacy.
Lee and Peters give competent performances, especially considering the little they have to work with scriptwise. Jared Leto is … there, blinking doe-eyed in an awkwardly innocent way that makes those cult-leader accusations even harder to fight.
But the most remarkable thing about Tron: Ares is how wholly unremarkable it is.
Given the fertile opportunities of AI uprisings and the incredibly damaging role gargantuan tech companies play in all of our lives, Ares somehow makes its stance on these subjects harder to pick out than literal tears in rain.
Between a good chase or two and a fight here and there, it dodges and weaves away from any commentary, originality, importance or purpose with such surprising skill it almost makes up for how boring it ends up being.
That said, it does not make for the worst movie ever made. And if you ignore the techno-fetishization and the idea of AI somehow turning into the martyred saviour of mankind, it’s slick and exciting enough to entertain. It’s just also kind of evil. Though these days, what that we consume isn’t?
