Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Joachim Rønning (dir.), Tron: Ares

Apparently I have developed sufficient distance to be at least somewhat objective about a Tron movie. Tron: Ares is ... not good.

It's not awful. It's fine. It's a movie-shaped object. The dialogue, especially in the first third, is too on-the-nose, too screenwriter-school, too concerned with making sure the audience picks up what it's putting down in terms of plot and character. It spends an insufficiency of time inside the computer and too much time bringing inside-the-computer to the Real World.

However. It does look pretty. It has nonwhite characters, something both previous films were sorely lacking. Greta Lee absolutely carries the bulk of the movie, and Gillian Anderson does the heavy lifting for all her scenes. (Zarf: "A good movie would have stabbed the kid and let Mom carry the third act.")

There's a plot. It's ridiculous, as is traditional. The Macguffin is "the permanence code," an algorithm that can allow things to come out of the computer and not fall apart after twenty-nine minutes. The rival heads of rival big-tech-AI companies are trying to find it: one (the one whose computer-world is red) to sell weapons and soldiers to the military, one (the one whose computer-world is blue) to ... make orange trees in Alaska? Just go with it. It's still the case that good, as Jonathan L-- observed in the late nineties, is higher on the electromagnetic spectrum than evil. Eve Kim, the good CEO, finds the permanence code in some forty-year-old five-and-a-quarter floppies that used to belong to Kevin Flynn. Julian Dillinger pulls his main security program Ares into the real world and sends it to get the code from Eve. Ares gets cold feet at the thought of killing Eve and goes rogue, and plot ensues.

Having said that, I can't actually be all that objective about the movie. I imprinted hard on Tron as a kid. I enjoyed Tron Legacy even when it felt like it was trying really hard to visually distance itself from the original. The Ares script is a mess, but someone told the designers that they were making a sequel not just to Legacy but to the original as well. There's a portrait of David Warner, who played the human villain from the first movie, in his grandson's office in the evil corp. I laughed out loud in the theatre when Eve's phone rang and it was the descending-arpeggio motif from Wendy Carlos's Tron soundtrack.

And towards the end there's about a fifteen-minute sequence where Ares ends up in the 1980s 'grid'. It -is- the original Tron, dim lighting and lack of textures and all. I laughed again when the Bit turned up, and caught my breath as Ares shifted into a proper lightcycle. That made me so happy. It even had a few moments of appropriately airy philosophizing, this time about the value of mortality rather than "if you're a User then ... everything you've done has been according to a plan, right?". Jeff Bridges returns to full-on seventies guru mode, and that's pretty good too. (People will say "It's just The Dude from The Big Lebowski" but The Dude was always channeling the same flower-child vibe that Flynn embodied, just twenty years later.)

So, it was absolutely worth it to me, and I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.

Maybe I'll rewatch the multi-hour Making Of Tron stuff this week.

Postscript: I saw Ares in 3D. I mostly avoid things in 3D, it doesn't add much for me and costs a lot more. (My go-to "this was worth 3D" are Tron Legacy, which I might have a different opinion on now, and The Cave Of Lost Dreams, Werner Herzog's movie about cave paintings, which really did benefit from being able to see how the artists used the texture of the wall.) This was worth it mostly to say "yep, 3D movies do very little for me, even in the kind of effects extravaganza that they're sold for."