Tron: Ares
A Soul with No Character
Look, I've tried writing this like a dozen times now and when that happens I just go with my gut and say what the hell I've been trying to say.
Tron: Ares is an incredibly frustrating film because I can see the masterpiece they left on the cutting room floor. If you can forget for a second that Jared Leto was a bad Joker in a bad movie, and uh... Morbius, you'll remember why this dude gets roles like Requiem for a Dream, American Psycho, Fight Club, Blade Runner 2049, and now Tron: Ares. He is a solid actor and he puts in a solid performance as the film's 100% expendable digital super soldier with an affinity for Depeche Mode and Tears in the Rain.
In fact, his character is so good I think the core reason critics and audiences have been so harsh on the film is because we don't see enough of him. Ares is the soul of a character who doesn't get the development needed to truly bring him to life. Kind of ironic given the plot revolves around him attempting to secure a permanent existence in the real world.
But that's the thing, man. I WANTED to see more of his development throughout the movie. He's an interesting character that defies a lot of expectations and shows there's some real nuance to his growth from the beginning of the film to the end. But all we get are glimpses of it with massive gaps between.
The film opens with Ares being run through training exercises where he fights and dies over and over again until he completes the training alive. It's a brutal and psychologically destructive process that clearly imparts severe trauma on him. Or at least that's the only logic assumption we can draw because just a few scenes later he's already displaying the sentience that the rest of the film is built on. Ares is supposed to be an unfeeling program. He's supposed to be the ultimate disposable weapon. But he's a soft spoken and vulnerable person before the film even really gets going. Scenes of him privately dealing with his trauma, discovering human art, and contemplating his eventual defiance would have done so much to help define him more clearly. How did this program, created by the absolutely impetuous Julian Dillinger, develop feelings at all?
Julian barely shows a shred of human decency until the final act of the film when his machines disregard him entirely. Clu from Tron: Legacy was very well developed and a similar arc could have applied to Ares to show his character evolve from a program directed to do task into a person driven to extremes by that task, just on a different side of the conflict.
Likewise, Ares's subordinate Athena is equally enthralling to watch. Jodie Turner-Smith puts in a phenomenal performance, sculpting Athena into the malevolent murder machine Ares fails to be. Unlike Ares who needed more build up, Athena's character arc needed a deeper long term progression. She's always one step behind Ares on his path to sentience, but the film fails to develop that into two characters with equal footing clashing over a difference of perspective.
Both characters are tasked with retrieving The Permanence Code, a line of code that lets their digital form manifest and remain in the real world. Without this code, they can only subsist in the real world for 29 minutes. Ares wants Permanence for nebulous reasons, but at his core he just wants to experience a real life. Athena wants it because her creator demands it and because in her hands, it will be shared with all the programs on Dillinger's grid.
Ares's motivations are almost selfish by comparison. I think there's a clear subtext of Athena not being traumatized by the repeated cycles of living and dying like Ares was. It's a shame the movie doesn't delve into that because I think instead of just realizing she wasn't coming back for another cycle when Ares kills her while the Dillinger grid is offline, she could have realized she was never the villain. She was just another victim of Julian's egotistical pursuits. In Julian's eyes, everyone on the grid is a slave, 100% expendable, deleted if they demonstrate weakness. But the film goes to great lengths, as with the previous two Tron films, to show that programs are people too, in their own ways at least.
Athena shows flashes of a greater purpose, but the film is more interested in keeping that purpose out of reach physically and emotionally. You get the sense she knows this, but it's kept superficial at worst and implied at best.
Some of the highlights of Tron: Ares I just have to get off my chest are the gorgeous score by Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross delivered a stunningly dark, slick, and emotionally dense soundtrack for this film that serves as the carrier for the brutal red barbarity of Julian's vision. It's at times oppressively heavy, at others it's effortless slick and funky. "I Know You Can Feel It" elevates one of the film's most sedate and aura farming chase sequences to the absolute purest of vibes. Ares and Eve Kim escaping the Dillinger grid as Ares betrays his creator with supreme calm hinges almost entirely on this track, and together, the scene and the score deliver the goods.
In all honesty, all of the action sequences in the film are incredible. The film makes a clear effort to show the geography and relative position of the all players in each scene, using wide establishing shots to let the world and action within it envelope us.
From a cop car getting cut in half by a lightcycle trail to Athena getting drop kicked by a dirt bike, the action scenes in this film are mostly a master class in how to do real world stunts with a sci-fi twist.
There's some pretty awkward "damsel in distress falls to extend the scene while deflating it's tension" moments between Eve and Athena, but beyond that, the cast and crew executed the film's action moments brilliantly.
It often feels like the film is missing 1/3 of it's run time because some executive with not enough brains and too much authority thought the time between action scenes was too long. I almost don't blame them because despite the absolute detriment those hypothetical cuts were to the overall film, the action sequences were almost good enough to make up for them.
One final thing I really appreciated was there being no forced love interest romance bullshit between Eve and Ares. It would have been so easy to play into the machine falls for the girl trope and the film avoids it almost entirely. Eve see Ares as an individual the moment she realizes he's not an ordinary unfeeling program. She respects his autonomy and path to self discovery, serving more like emotional support and a helping hand along the way, instead of as a hand to be held. It's a refreshing departure from the typical "we bang" nonsense Hollywood films LOVE to pull in Sci-Fi features. It's also refreshing that Ares immediately (thanks to his Terminator vision, which is a hilarious thing to describe it as considering what I'm about to say) gauges Eve as "empathetic" to him.
He doesn't hold her up on a pedestal as some sort of romantic fascination. He recognizes she cares about him as a fellow being with self awareness. Whether it's his programming using that care to exploit her for it's own purposes is kind of dubious at first. But if the film did more to develop Ares as a character, the payoff of him actually just appreciating being cared about would have hit a lot harder.
I think the only thing I really walked away from the film disappointed by was Ares calling Depeche Mode an 80s pop band. You might disagree but their lyrics are some of the most beautiful examples of deep expression in simple terms. Their sound has felt cutting edge and refreshing for over 40 years. And their best songs are hard hitting and complex ballads about loneliness, fear, malice, and heartbreak.
It kind of felt like a nod to Leto being in American Psycho, which is famous for Christian Bale's brilliant adaption of Bret Easton Ellis's entire chapters of album reviews. Ares uses lots of yuppie ass words to describe how much he likes Depeche Mode's sound. But in a wonderful bit of character development later in the film, midway through his machine-meets-Bale recitation of why he's drawn to Depeche Mode, he breaks and simply says it's just a feeling.
End of line, Tron: Ares might not be the ascendant father and son catharsis drama that Tron: Legacy was, or the landmark VFX masterpiece with a character-driven heart of gold that the original Tron was, but I think it got a lot of undo shit and I'm at least glad you took the time to read about why I'm drawn to it. Yeah, I grew up with Tron being one of those formative movies my dad put on for movie night one weekend that changed my view of the world a little. So maybe I'm biased. But I think if you remember how to have fun and just let yourself get engrossed in the vibes, Tron: Ares is an excellent ride, my dude.
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