TRON: ARES waS disappointing
Tron: Ares was… disappointing.
Don’t get me wrong. There were definitely parts I liked. I mean, most of those parts were the parts they showed in the trailers that hyped everyone up, but it had other redeeming elements as well.
I thought Vivek did a pretty job playing himself as an obnoxious tech executive, but I gotta say, I don’t think that qualifies him to be governor of Ohio.
And I was initially skeptical of Jared Leto’s casting, but he did a great job playing an emotionless AI with a Messiah complex.
But man oh man, this movie has modern Disney’s stink all over it.
First of all, how does this movie look worse than Tron: Legacy, a movie that came out 15 years ago?
Has anybody else noticed how modern Disney movies and shows all have this disgusting grey hue in nearly all of their scenes? To be fair, it’s not just Disney… other studios like Netflix and Apple have this problem too…
Is it reshoots? Is it because they’re filming outside to get natural light but using greenscreens to digitally change the background, creating a weird uncanny valley effect?
The best looking scenes in the movie were the chase scenes that took place at night and, ironically, in the real world. Which, yes, the movie was advertised as the digital world coming to the real one and “Worlds colliding…” but they could have done a better job making the scenes on the grid not look like a Playstation 2 cutscene.
Speaking of making the movie look better… what happened to all the good looking actors?
Do you remember how freaking cool everybody looked in Tron: Legacy? I was 13 when that movie came out and I was obsessed with the costume designs… and with Olivia WIlde and Serinda Swan… for obvious reasons.
Meanwhile, Tron: Ares is headlined by a 53-year-old Jared Leto doing his best Jared Leto impression, with the obligatory Disney girlboss played by 42-year-old Greta Lee doing her best to act more human than the AI.
Evan Peters plays the Elon stand-in, Gillian Anderson plays Elon’s mom, and this fucking idiot plays the most useless & annoying character I’ve had to endure in a movie in a long time.
The best character though, by far, is Joy Reid as Athena, the murderous AI entity whose sole purpose is to cause death and destruction but still plays the victim when she’s taken down by the good guys. What did Disney mean by this?
I’m kidding by the way… she’s not played by Joy Reid but by Jodie Turner-Smith, the queen witch from the hit Disney Plus show The Acolyte.
But I’m telling you, when they introduced her character in the movie, it took me at least 15 seconds to conclude it wasn’t Joy Reid because she looks exactly like her… at least when she’s cosplaying as Eminem.
I did appreciate how they didn’t exaggerate the potential for AI to make privacy completely nonexistent.
We might not be there yet, but there are currently hundreds of satellites in orbit that can take pictures of the earth with resolutions as low as 30cm per pixel… the width of a standard school ruler… and can theoretically be used to coordinate live feed of surveillance on somebody from 300 miles above the surface.
Plug that live feed into a n AI backed by shiny new massive data centers they’re building in places like Delta? Boom… big brother is watching.
That’s not a joke by the way. If you didn’t know, residents of states like Utah, Virginia, and countless others are seeing their farmlands and water rights stripped away to make room for massive data centers that drive up energy and real estate prices.
Tron: Ares wants to be thoughtful and profound, and it has its moments where it teases interesting concepts like AI adopting its own morality, but it also has criminally braindead characters whose decisions make me question the intelligence of the writers. After all, characters can only be as smart as the people writing them.
Anyways, Tron: Ares is 4/10… watch it if you want, you’re not missing anything if you don’t.
