Tron: Ares
Starring Jared Leto, Greta Lee and Evan Peters
M
2.75/5
The third film in the Tron franchise, Tron: Ares is an unfulfilling sci-fi action movie that feels more like a low-rent Terminator film than a Tron sequel. Ares (Jared Leto), an elite defence AI from the Grid cyberspace realm, is dispatched to the real world to find an invaluable program. Most of the characters are one-dimensional and Leto as Ares is stiff and uninteresting, but Greta Lee stands out as Eve Kim, a clever, resourceful woman who Ares breaks his directive to protect. The contrived plot is driven by the bluntest of Macguffins – a “Permanence Code” that allows programs to exist indefinitely outside the Grid (which was under Eve’s nose all along, but not in a clever way) – and the flashy action scenes carry little sense of threat, especially since the villain can recreate Ares and other programs whenever needed. The plot even squanders a goldmine of tension: programs in the real world disintegrates after 29 minutes, and applying this terminal limit to Eve, who is reconstituted from the Grid, would have infused some much-needed urgency. The original Tron from 1982 pioneered CGI in feature films, and the 2010 sequel Tron: Legacy rendered the Grid using more advanced versions of the tools Tron spearheaded. Ares brings Tron’s iconic hard-light and circuitry-inspired visuals into the real world for the first time, with the highlight being a fast-paced light-cycle chase through the city. Even so, the visuals are less pretty than in Tron: Legacy, Jeff Bridges fleeting fan-service return as Flynn is less special this time, and Nine Inch Nails droning, brooding score is more abrasive than Daft Punk’s score for Legacy.
Bright, loud and shallow, Tron: Ares brings the blue screen of death to the Tron franchise and is playing in most Victorian cinemas.
