TRON: Ares

TRON: Ares is spectacularly designed, swiftly paced, thoughtfully written, and directed within an inch of its neon-hued life.

TRON: Ares doesn’t seem poised to change the culture in anything resembling a similar way; while it has a lot more life to it than the inert TRON: Legacy, Ares keeps its focus on big spectacle as opposed to big ideas.

Ranked against other “Tron” feature-length installments, while this one fails to capture the adolescent low-fi charm of the 1982 film, it’s appreciably more enjoyable (and, frankly, comprehensible) than “Legacy.”

Rønning’s dazzling action sequences and the killer soundtrack might be enough to satisfy fans, but Tron: Ares feels just as likely to get lost among a sea of the type of films Tron inspired.

Ares is a mostly disposable and thoroughly dumb product of lazy franchise fetishism from filmmakers who could not seem to care less about what story they are trying to tell. But as a two-hour visual screensaver to a thunderous and hypnotic Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, Ares rules.

Tron: Ares has, in no uncertain terms, a great frickin’ soundtrack. The movie, on other hand, completely sucks.

There is no drama or jeopardy or human interest anywhere. This franchise now looks about as urgently contemporary as an in-car CD player.

Absolutely amazing. I was shocked at the low reviews. It deserves 9/10 at least.

The visuals are absolutely breathtaking, but the story could use a lot of work.

Watching TRON: Ares is less like watching a movie and more like watching a highlight compilation of a TV show on YouTube. You get nothing but the highlights, but it's hollowed out due to the lack of plot and character development that's clearly been left out. Unlike in the original TRON and TRON: Legacy, TRON: Ares tries to cover a lot more ground than its predecessors in terms of all the characters, sub-plots, and world-building it tries to do all at once. Not only this, but the movie feels like it was originally scripted to be a TV show with how much more it's trying to cover. But for the most part, the rushed plot development doesn't help the movie out. It only makes the movie feel so rushed and underdeveloped; leaving you with the same kind of feeling you get when you read a 2 minute synopsis of a book over actually reading the book. It leaves you with data and an understanding of what happened, but no emotional impact or investment into the actual story, it's characters, or what the author was trying to convey. If they had made this movie into a TV series instead, it honestly would have done much better as it would have given Disney more time to really bring the story they wanted to tell to life. But if they needed to keep it a movie, they could have easily gutted so much of the characters and sub-plots that were ultimately unnecessary (Eve's friends and coworkers, in particular). In short, TRON: ARES leaves a lot to be desired and prioritizes spectacle, ensemble, and fan service over truly fleshed out and well developed story-telling. And while neither of the two predecessors were well-known for world-building, either, they at least left you with the sense that the movie you watched had a complete and emotionally impactful story that actually mattered and was worth remembering. Something that ARES sorely lacks.

This movie is terrible. I am beyond parsing the reasons why modern movies are terrible. Nothing original and the writing is just freaking awful. Nothing happens in this film to counter that. The original Tron was groundbreaking and holds up surprisingly well as a film; this is some kind of weird cash in that makes zero sense, a la the Marvel universe. Shame on Disney; really: shame on you. This is sh**.

Modern Disney destroys another one of its intellectual properties. Like many of its recent sequels, Tron Ares completely misses what made the amazing Tron Legacy work, and instead throws the superficial elements hoping they will stick together. Take the cool character and vehicle designs, make a few tweaks (A data disc can now be triangular, wow!), add a famous group for soundtrack, and throw in a Jeff Bridges cameo, it's what them nerds will eat, right? The result is a messy movie that leaves you with fewer IQ points than you begin with. If in Legacy the digitalization laser was a unique thing, here everybody carries it in their backpack. The plot is disjointed, messy and predictable - the puppy-eyed Jared Leto finds feelings and becomes human, roll credits. The lead actresses are completely wooden and lack any sort of charisma. The main villain Julian Dillinger doesn't have a non-cringy line, and his post-credit teaser is ridiculous. The continuity with Tron and Tron Legacy here is thrown in the trash can, this is essentially a bad fan fiction, there are just too many inconsistencies to even begin listing. It's not 1/10 only for generally solid CGI and like two decent tracks on the OST. The fact that NIN actually start singing over some scenes was a ridiculous cherry on top of this bad circus.