As a movie, it's a good video game, an epic-styled "Pixel Vs. Pixel."
Tron: Ares
The film opens Friday, October 10, only in movie theaters, via Disney. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.
As a thunderously loud cinematic experience, Tron: Ares is among the most visually-focused events of the year, a video game writ very large, and best seen on the largest screen possible with the loudest sound system in existence.
This movie is freakin' loud!
As a movie, however, Tron: Ares is risibly ridiculous, with much unintentionally (?!) bad dialogue, often sounding like gibberish, if, that is, you can make out what is being said amidst the overwhelmingly explosive soundtrack. Never has any movie needed subtitles more than this.
The actors do their level best to give life to characters who stubbornly resist their best efforts. Greta Lee makes a good impression as the protagonist, Eve Kim, CEO of a tech company. She is committed to doing good with tech's latest wonder child, A.I., on behalf of her beloved sister, who died tragically young.
Evan Peters plays her complete opposite, an evil CEO of a tech company named Julian Dillinger, who only lacks a mustache to twirl around as he dances and orders murders (?!) casually: "DELETE HIM!!!" And then with a moment's hesitation: "DELETE HER!!!" And then withOUT a moment's hesitation: "DELETE THEM ALL!!!"
All we needed to cap it was a cackling laugh. (Note: dialogue above is not verbatim. I was laughing too hard to write it all down accurately. But it's the jist.)
I write this as someone who loved Tron as a young man in 1982. Now, as an old man in 2025 -- though not as old as Jeff Bridges, hint hint, nudge nudge -- and ignoring completely Tron: Legacy (2010), which I forgot I saw until I looked it up and remembered a few details, Tron: Ares exceeds both previous films in the sheer outlandish nerve of mixing memories of the video game experience with the current realities of the IMAX movie experience.
(Did I mention how LOUD this movie is? It's freakin' loud.)
Early on, I was stunned by the visual experience of watching Tron: Ares. Whether you are stunned into silence or stunned into bewilderment or stunned into leaving the theater are three different stories.
Jared Leto is the leader of the pixel police, known as Ares. His life capacity is only 29 minutes, so he better hustle, baby, if he's going to carry out the directives given by the all-powerful giant head, activated by Evan Peters as Julian the Evil CEO tapping away on his keyboard and ignoring his kind-hearted billionaire mother, Elisabeth Dillinger (Gillian Anderson), who mothers her man-child baby and urges him to choose the better course for humanity, which he, of course, blithely ignores, because he has people to delete! The more, the better!
Jodie Turner-Smith follows the directives as a hyperactive T2-type machine pixel robot guard sent into "real" life in order to find and destroy Jared Leto, since he won't follow orders -- 'delete, delete, delete' -- and so she must tidy up by deleting everyone and also by bringing 80s video pieces to modern life in a modern city, making traffic really bad for everyone.
Admittedly, after I realized the movie wasn't getting better from a narrative or logical perspective, I sat back and soaked in the visual grandeur of director Joachim Rønning, who surely deserves a prize for maintaining his sanity in the middle of so much computer-generated insanity.
As a longtime movie fan, I can testify that Tron: Ares may not be a very good movie, but it's a great video game that looks fantastic on a big honking movie screen.