Now streaming — Tron: Ares, a stunning, highly-underrated sci-fi masterpiece

Review by C.J. Bunce

The vast majority of us didn’t even have a home computer yet, not even one with a floppy drive, and we were just starting to understand what BASIC meant in all caps. Nearly 45 years ago teens, young adults, and anyone into sci-fi gathered for a Disney movie that didn’t look like a Disney movie–or any previous movie. At one of the SouthRidge III theaters–not the big one–someone threw wet Lifesavers at the screen to get them to stick. Then the curtain dropped, the lights went down, and sci-fi was changed forever. Tron was a technological innovation, a marvel. Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn and Bruce Boxleitner’s Tron, a User and a Program, interact in a fully realized alternate universe after Flynn is sucked into his own computer system. Nearly thirty years later the Disney prequel comic Tron: Betrayal and the movie sequel Tron: Legacy revisited the computer world known as the Grid to show us what happened to Flynn and Tron. That world continued in the video game Tron RUN/r, the animated series Tron: Uprising, and even a Disney theme park ride.

After a brief showing in theaters, the next chapter is streaming to a much wider audience as Tron: Ares comes to Disney+. Everything you’ve heard is wrong–The movie isn’t only fantastic, it’s faithful to the original with lots of nice throwbacks and Easter eggs. It’s future-forward, too, embracing the traps of a world with A.I. being pounded into everyone by corporate interests, all while dipping back into the past to show audiences how far we’ve come. It’s a science fiction masterpiece for people who love great science fiction–a thrilling ride that ups the ante from movies like Blade Runner 2049 with its message and futurism.

For those not involved in the computing world in the early 1980s, Tron first introduced audiences to programming terms like the Master Control Program (MCP), random access memory (RAM), and the idea of avatars. It introduced us to light cycles, an early CG home run–even decades before quality 3D or IMAX. Audiences were ducking and dodging in their seats as opponents exploded into the walls of the Grid. Identity discs brought to life what were only blips on the screen in the “real” world, and we cringed as Flynn took a step too close and almost fell off the game rings. Its backlight animation worked amazingly well for our first entry into a world we hadn’t seen before. Video games were just beyond the stage of blip games like Pong. It was a time before the Atari 2600, just as coin-op games were gaining traction in big cities. Tron’s release made that explode across the world. No other film since looks like Tron, not even its big budget 2010 sequel Tron: Legacy or its 2012 animated series Tron: Uprising. Until now.

Jared Leto has spent years in genre movies, some good, some not so good. Consider his performance as Ares his best genre work yet, improving upon Jeff Bridge’s CGI, de-aged Clu character from Tron: Legacy. If anything’s wrong, Ares shows too much emotion for a digital character, not quite finding the balance Olivia Wilde’s Quorra created for Tron: Legacy. Director Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Kon-Tiki) flips the script on the 1982 movie and then takes it back again. Ares is a new artificial lifeform created in the digital realm who is 3D-printed into matter in our world–a high-tech, plug-and-play, humanoid robot. Several scenes borrow from an earlier 1980s take on the idea–Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. Ares is a similar soldier, built by the grandson of David Warner’s Ed Dillinger, head of the tech company Dillinger Systems. Julian Dillinger, played by X-Men Quicksilver actor Evan Peters, could not play the Dillinger 3.0 generation with greater currency as he tries to sell investors on his new super-soldier, telling them A.I. is coming to them, not vice versa–a twist on the original Tron story that pulled Flynn into the digital world. But there’s a problem they don’t know about. The soldiers only survive for 29 minutes, then they dissolve into dust. Julian’s mom knows this, the woman Julian finagled the company from in backstory. She’s played by sci-fi icon Gillian Anderson, the perfect Dillinger 2.0, bringing the same kind of gravitas David Warner brought to the franchise.

Aware of the 29-minute barrier, competing company ENCOM is racing to get to the “Permanence Code” first. As Julian says, “Whoever controls the Permanence Code controls the future.” ENCOM, Flynn’s company, has been passed from his son (who drove off with Quorra at the end of Tron: Legacy) to sisters Tess and Eve Kim. Tess was trying to use A.I. to improve the world, nature, healthcare, medicine, but died before achieving her goals, leaving Eve to run the company. We catch up with Eve, played by Greta Lee (Wayward Pines, Chance), as she and jovial employee Seth (Arturo Castro) are seeking the Permanence Code in a secluded arctic lair created by Eve, filled with Flynn’s floppy discs and backup server.

But these are hackers and few secrets are held long between Dillinger Systems and ENCOM, so Julian Dillinger directs Ares to capture Eve and retrieve the code. Ares, who also borrows something from Pinocchio, is struggling with constantly being destroyed and re-created. Somehow he has some compassion in his code and decides to make a deal with Eve. This makes way for his lieutenant soldier, Jodie Turner-Smith’s Grace Jones-esque Athena, to replace Ares as Master Control of the Grid. Battles ensue, including aerial wars with slick new wasp-like flying creations. Wisely the script keeps the show’s plot with its key players Leto, Peters, Lee, Turner-Smith, Castro, and Anderson. Hasan Minhaj (The Daily Show) and Sarah Desjardins (The Night Agent) round out the cast as ENCOM employees.

Along the way Ares is prevented from returning to his digital world, so Eve uses Flynn’s original laser to return him to the Grid of the original Tron movie. It’s that point where Tron: Ares breaks through to surpass all expectations. Ares gets to revisit the distant past, with the aid of a vintage “YesYesYesYes” floating Bit, and ride an original lightcycle across the original Grid. It’s perfectly executed–balancing the low-tech of 1982 with today’s much-advanced CGI. It was in this world that director Steven Lisberger in the 1982 movie was able to film Bruce Boxleitner as Alan Bradley aka Tron and Jeff Bridges as programmer/hacker/high scorer Flynn in a complex blue-black and white costume and fill in the details in post-production and place them in a brilliantly colored, infinitely tiny, futuristic universe. The look was both retro to an almost 1940s vision of the future and yet also it pushed ahead, way ahead, to some future we will never really meet. Or will we?

Tron offered a one-of-a-kind and unreal world where, in the classic sci-fi style of The Fly, you can be teleported to someplace not outside but deep within this world, where Flynn tries to understand his new world of the Users, to fight to survive with identity disk battles and light cycle races, and to get home. Boxleitner, who would get far less screen time than Jeff Bridges, provided an understated hero for a generation of kids. David Warner (Time After Time, Star Trek V, VI, Star Trek: The Next Generation), one of the best actors to play a villain in any franchise, also played a triple role as Dillinger, Sark, and the Master Control Program, giving movies three of its all-time best villains, and adding yet another perfect genre performance to Warner’s portfolio. Tron: Ares offers a return to that world and takes it forward, showing a more believable look at Flynn’s legacy than anything since 1982.

Jesse Wigutow’s story expands the typical cautionary tale of The Terminator–technology is going to destroy us–to both repeating the warning and hinting at what positive things could come in the right hands. If only humans weren’t humans?

Wendy Carlos’ synthesizer score shared in the creation of the future in the 1982 movie, and the music was updated by Daft Punk for Tron: Legacy. Nine Inch Nails’ score takes a hand-off in its approach from Daft Punk for Tron: Ares, providing a thrilling digital heartbeat that is as exhilarating and fun as the visuals. Kudos to Patrick Banister (known for reboots of RoboCop, Total Recall, The Thing) for art direction, rock video director Jeff Cronenweth for cinematography, and Christine Bieselin Clark (Tron: Legacy, Ender’s Game) and Alix Friedberg for the costume designs for the new Grid world–their best throwback to an early Tron costume comes at the very end.

The in-movie arcade game Space Paranoids, which Flynn mastered in Tron is back, including a quick reference to Tron as an actual game (a change from the original movie). Nothing then compared to the tie-in Tron arcade game based on the film that spread to around 800 units across the country in the year after the 1982 film was released. Its light-up joystick became another iconic image of the early 1980s and the game a staple among 1980s game players. Release of a sequel to the game occurs on the night Julian Dillinger hacks into ENCOM. Unfortunately we don’t get to see how Space Paranoids’ sequel Panic City would have appeared. That cold and almost scary ENCOM cube office environment is back, too–it became the norm for offices across the world, the look of the workplace when the dot-com generation arrived 20 years later.

Tron is a member of the exclusive clubhouse of the greatest year of movies–1982, a summer that gave us E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, and John Carpenter’s The Thing. For a movie fan, if you were stuck in a time warp you could hardly find a better place to be than 1982. Getting noticed in a year of movies like Conan the Barbarian, Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, Rocky III, First Blood, Tootsie, The Secret of NIMH, The Last Unicorn, Night Shift, The Man from Snowy River, Tex, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, with Raiders of the Lost Ark still in theaters was no small feat. Tron: Ares is a worthy legacy for what the designers of Tron at Disney began so long ago, complete with an opening for another sequel, although Disney’s history with the franchise is fraught with starts and stops and a sequel very soon is unlikely.

Industrial Light & Magic should get Oscar recognition for the effects. Here’s a quick look ILM prepared: