Tron Ares, the most recent installment of the Tron franchise, was met with skepticism from the moment the movie was announced. Ares itself is an entertaining action flick with well-used CGI and impressive cinematography. However, it didn’t seem to connect with viewers and the audience members, as it’s shaping up to be over 100 million dollars lost for Disney.
Tron Ares is the second sequel to the 1982 film “Tron,” which was released at the same time video games were starting to gain popularity. CGI was new at the time, and its use to create the digital world in the movie captivated viewers.
Following the programmer Kevin Flynn’s journey, Tron explored the idea of what it means to create something that grows beyond your control and starts to gain consciousness. This idea was very original at the time and can be appreciated today during the age of AI.
In Tron, Flynn is sent into the digital world, where the programs are made in the image of their programmers. What captivated people about the upcoming Tron Ares is the exploration of a new idea, where the programs come into the physical world.
Jared Leto plays a super-intelligent AI named Ares, who is created by Julian Dillinger and whose sole purpose is to kill for the company. As Ares starts to develop self-understanding and feelings, he aims to find a way to stay in reality permanently. As Ares is the main character in the movie, you’d think that the film would explore his newfound identity fully. But they really just don’t.
While Ares is set in the same world as the previous films, many of the characters are absent from the film. Instead, we are placed in a world of tech leaders in which a military AI has been created and named after the god of war, Ares. The movie is mainly a struggle between members of the company to either thwart or further develop the production of the AI.
While Tron Ares does have its bright spots, the movie never quite succeeds in connecting to the rest of the franchise. It has been almost 16 years since the 2010 Tron: Legacy, and there wasn’t really a demand for another movie, even by the most loyal fans of the franchise, leaving fans and critics to wonder, Why was the film made in the first place?
