Tron: Ares review: a soft reboot that’s running low on RAM

Nevertheless TRON: Legacy It wasn’t a sterling piece of cinema, and its gorgeous visuals and score of Daft Punk hype made it an enjoyable update to the original 1982 Cult Classic. The film tried to strike a healthy balance between nostalgic fan service and nostalgia for the source material to make itself feel like an evolutionary step forward for You see privilege. legacy It didn’t quite meet Disney’s box office expectations, but it was successful enough for his studio to keep itself entertained on the possibility of a sequel.

Tron: Ares It is a moderate attempt to shake things up and bring the worlds of software and users together in a way that aims to mirror the rise of artificial intelligence here in our reality. You can see that director Joachim Rönning is trying to present it legacyOptical sight, and in Ares“The result, you can hear the nine-inch nails working, makes the film sound like a moody reflection on life in Bruce’s Silicon Valley era of technology.

But unlike legacywhich felt like a theme park ride for technology forward, Ares is a soft, uninspired reboot that spends most of its time questioning a plot that is as convoluted as it is predictable. Despite having a surprisingly hard-working cast (and questionable lead performances), the film doesn’t really know what to do with any of its stars outside of putting them in spot suits and using them to set up another sequel that doesn’t quite feel like it will or should pay off. And ” Ares Does it feature some dazzling pieces, it’s nowhere near enough to justify the price of admission.

It is set in the aftermath of the events legacyand Tron: Ares It introduces a group of knights of new humans and digital beings whose lives are all intertwined in a technology company’s business dealings. Although Eve Kim (Greta Lee) is still a game designer at heart, as CEO of ENCOM, she has become the face of the company and dedicated herself to researching how virtual constructs appear in the real world as physical, organic objects. While most of the public thinks of the company as a giant, Eve and her colleagues Seth Flores (Arturo Castro) and Ajay Singh (Hasan Minhaj) see their research as a more important type of work that could revolutionize the world.

The ENCOM crew wants to use their experimental technology – which is a bit like 3D printing with lasers – to mass produce foods and develop new life-saving medicines. But at Dillinger Systems, Eve’s rival, Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), is hard at work on similar technology that he intends to deploy for military purposes.

When Julian first gives a group of investors a pitch for his ability to bring Ares’s (Jared Leto) software into the real world, the Twitchy Tech Bro is eager to shine on the fact that his creations only last for a few minutes. Julian’s driven mother, Elizabeth (a criminally underutilized Gillian Anderson), knows her son is a bit of a fraud. But Julian and Eve learn that it may be possible to make digital objects last if they can track down a long-lost permanence code originally developed by Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges).

In his opening act, as the two sides fly around the world for a MacGuffin, Tron: Ares It seems like an unholy mix of the latest Mission: impossible and Jurassic World Features. Eve, Julian, and Seth talk almost exclusively in cheerful gallery pranks that make it seem as if this script doesn’t trust your ability to follow its relatively straightforward plot. It’s not long before Eve finds the Code of Permanence, and sends Julian Ares after her to bring the goods back home. The chases decline and all hope seems lost. But when Ares seems to have the upper hand, his timer runs out, it sucks him into Dillinger’s network, and Dillinger is forced to start over as if he were playing a frustrating arcade game.

matters a little (but only a a little) is even more interesting in the digital world of Dillinger’s servers where Ares and his second in command, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith, also underutilized), are spawned again and again after each of their failures to complete missions in the real world. The grid serves mostly as a menacing backdrop as Ares — whom Leto portrays with an awkward flatness that is meant to charm, but fails — displays the meaning of his existence. But the digital world is also where… Tron: Ares I managed (but almost not quite) to express some interesting ideas about how AI companies are fixated on building psychophanty employees rather than actually developing ones that can benefit the masses.

This narrative energy is far less effective in the real world, where Ares becomes an unlikely hero as his encounters with Eve leave him increasingly convinced that he’s on the wrong team. Lee and Leto have a raw chemistry that makes the film’s hints at a budding romance feel like the wrong choice — especially considering their characters can’t spend all that time together. And while both actors do a serviceable job in the transition Ares‘VFX-Heavy Set makes the series look extremely snazzy Tron™ The vehicles, on the whole, the film action are so bland that it rarely feels like anyone is truly enjoying themselves here.

What’s even more puzzling is that Disney clearly thinks people might be hungry for another sequel after this, even though the studio didn’t have the greatest confidence in Ares itself. It makes sense from the way Anderson and Cameron Monaghan’s characters are barely part of the story that Disney left a bit on the cutting room floor – perhaps in the hopes of simplifying things Ares It feels more like a reboot than a sequel that had to pick up the dangling threads of the last feature. This might work for people new to this franchise who come in with low expectations, but for anyone who’s familiar with what it’s like You see It can be when cooking with heat, and it’s not worth much here.

Tron: Ares Also stars Sarah Desjardins. The film hits theaters on October 10.