“What are you looking for?"
“Permanence.”
The third installment of the TRON franchise introduces entirely new characters, with only Flynn appearing in a key scene. Set in the modern era, the premise is that an AI-style tech race is on. The tech here is not AI though, it’s the world of TRON. By now, everyone knows the TRON world inside computers exists, and the goal is to bring digitally-generated humanoids and machines from TRON into the real world. The problem is that the real-world versions of these generated artifacts last only 29 minutes. The initiating incident, and Macguffin, is the discovery of how to make them last longer.
The history of these new characters is explained through exposition via news reports. These set up a hero (though not a protagonist), Eve Kim, who has taken over Encom. It also sets a villain, Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the grandson of Ed Dillinger, villain of the original TRON. Their race is positioned as Eve Kim/Encom wanting to use tech for good, whereas the Dillinger Corporation wants to use it for military applications.
The protagonist is Ares (Jared Leto), an advanced TRON program that is “Master Control”, a program that guides all others in the security of Dillinger systems. Though the story isn’t about AI, it’s clear the advanced tech in Ares is based on the concept. We see Ares “trained” through a series of battles. Ares can combine searches across various data sources in pursuit of a goal. Most notably, Ares is learning based on language.
This last point creates a clever character motivation. Ares is like a large language model, so his learning is based on the language he encounters. As he dwells on the words from his evil creators and the benevolent Kim, he begins to feel ambivalent about his “directives” (his programming). The movie actually keeps up this theme of words somewhat well.
TRON movies are action movies. Ares lives up to the reputation. Every chase scene is beautiful, draping the screen in the movie’s glowing red theme. Most scenes keep clear what is happening, only one devolves into generic action blur. The fight scenes are well-choreographed, with the speed and agility you’d expect from advanced reasoning machines.
The story makes feints at deeper themes of Frankenstein’s monster and the Biblical notion of free will being the sin and the defining characteristic of humanity. It also touches on the machine becoming more human than the humans. None of this comes across as high-concept because TRON: Ares still tries (for obvious profit-driven reasons) to be a wide-appeal action flick. The movie also keeps up the both-ways in its designs. There are new vehicles, but for nostalgia, one of the new digital villains decides to generate a Recognizer, the search machine from the first and second films. It looks completely different from the new machines. This all begins to feel exhausting.
The story also has an overly large cast of named characters. Much of the emotions are lost as we try to keep track of Ares and Eve, Ares and his digital nemesis Athena, Ares and Dillinger, Dillinger and his mother (Gillian Anderson), Eve and her sister, Eve and her assistant Seth, Eve and her CTO (Hasan Minhaj). Only two of these character dynamics create any palpable feeling or narrative propulsion.
The chief character sin is that lead character Eve Kim suffers from Trinity Syndrome, Tasha Robinson’s description of a strong female lead who lacks agency, or has any purpose besides helping the male protagonist. Even if a viewer is not motivated by questions of equality or characterizations, the time spent getting to know Kim feels like a waste once it becomes clear that Ares is the protagonist.
Still, TRON: Ares has charming moments in its action sequences and in some dialogue, including the climax conversation about permanence. It also unexpectedly backs off the glass and laser aesthetic with a low-tech getaway scene and an 80’s needle-drop.
Fans of the franchise may enjoy it. For everyone else, it’ll feel like a machine unsure of its directive.
