Disney releases Tron Ares, a sequel to both Tron and Tron Legacy, starring Jared Leto and Greta Lee, with Jeff Bridges again reprising the role of Flynn. Trent Reznor & Atticus provide the soundtrack (credited in studio publicity as Nine Inch Nails, but in the movie’s credits as themselves). 
Sisters Tess and Eve Kim take over ENCOM after Sam Flynn steps down for unspecified personal reasons, but Tess then steps down due to a particularly aggressive cancer that eventually takes her life, leaving Eve Kim as the sole CEO. Eve concentrates on what has proven to be ENCOM’s most enduring business – making video games – feeling that she lacks the vision Tess had for making the world a better place through technology. The grandson of a notorious former ENCOM CEO, Julian Dillinger, is now in charge of the family business; rather than improving the world for everyone, he sets out to be a high-tech arms dealer. (Elisabeth Dillinger, his mother, hovers close by, worried about both the bottom line and the already troublesome family legacy.) Now that there’s knowledge of the world inside computer systems everywhere, Dillinger and Kim are in a race to find the elusive secret that keeps the real and virtual worlds divided: the permanence code. While it is possible to 3-D print anything from an orange tree to a tank and its driver, delivering those things from the computer world to the real world, they remain tangibly viable for only 29 minutes before collapsing into lifeless raw matter. Kevin Flynn is rumored to have discovered the permanence code, but it has yet to be found. Dillinger demonstrates a new tank, and its driver, Ares, to an awed audience of potential military buyers, and then ushers them out before the “100% expendable” Ares and his vehicle disintegrate at the 29-minute mark. Ares is re-rezzed in the computer world to await further orders; this has happened to him many times.
Flynn’s basement computer lab has been transplanted to an isolated secret location, where Eve Kim searches through four-decade-old floppy disks looking for the permanence code. After months of trawling through his files, she finally finds it and tests it, creating an orange tree from digital data that is observed to have a stable existence in the real world for several hours. Transferring the information to a thumb drive, Eve heads back to ENCOM headquarters to stake her claim to this discovery. Dillinger, no closer to finding the code himself, settles for hacking the ENCOM server farm over his mother’s ethical objections, trying to track Eve’s movements – and dispatching Ares and fellow video warrior Athena (with lifespans of 29 minutes) to intercept Eve and take the code from her. Riding light cycles through real-world traffic, the two programs wreak havoc, but Eve evades them long enough to see her pursuers collapse into dust. Dillinger, growing more unhinged and unscrupulous by the hour, has a backup plan: fired from a helicopter, a laser similar to the one that brought the Flynns to the grid snags Eve Kim out of reality and deposits her in a Dillinger Systems server.
Ares and Athena have orders to extract the code from Eve’s memory, even if that results in “deleting the carrier” – destroying the data that could reconstitute Eve’s real body and consciousness – but Ares, having absorbed an enormous amount of biographical information about Eve to aid in his pursuit of her, experiences what Dillinger considers a malfunction: an empathetic response. Ares disobeys his programming to save Eve’s life and return her to a transfer point that will send her back to the real world, accompanying her as she goes. Having gone rogue, her has only 29 minutes to live, or return to the Dillinger server where he will certainly be deleted. Ares uses that time to return Eve to ENCOM to put a new plan into action: using Flynn’s original laser, Ares will be transferred into a replica of Flynn’s personal server to try to find the permanence code for himself. Julian Dillinger orders Athena to bring Eve to him “at any cost” – an unwise instruction, as Athena’s program now disregards any consideration for maintaining a low profile or avoiding loss of life, starting with Elisabeth Dillinger when she tries to shut down Julian’s plan. Smashing through ENCOM headquarters, Athena has Eve cornered, but her 29-minute time limit catches up with her. She prints a new body and a Recognizer to continue the pursuit. On the grid, Ares seems to encounter Flynn himself, or at least enough leftover data to pass as Flynn, and admits to having experienced feelings. This impresses the backup of Flynn enough to give Ares the permanence code, with one warning: once he’s back in the real world, fighting Athena’s forces, life for Ares and everyone around him may prove to be anything but permanent.
screenplay by Jesse Wigutow
story by David DiGilio and Jesse Wigutow
based on chracters created by Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird
directed by Joachim Rønning
music by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
Cast: Jared Leto (Ares), Greta Lee (Eve Kim), Jeff Bridges (Kevin Flynn), Evan Peters (Julian Dillinger), Jodie Turner-Smith (Athena), Gillian Anderson (Elisabeth Dillinger), Hasan Minhaj (Ajay Singh), Arturo Castro (Seth Flores), Cameron Monaghan (Caius), Sarah Desjardins (Erin), Aaron Paul Stewart (Cyber Security Pete), Roger Cross (Cross), Roark Critchlow (General McGrath), Katharine Isabelle (Marcia Lee Hadlow), Gary Vaynerchuk (Stuart Roche), Kwesi Ameyaw (Silvio), Robin Roberts (herself), Kara Swisher (herself), Dr. Fei-Fei Li (TED Speaker)Sandy Robson (Ajay’s Driver), Tal Shulman (ENCOM Engineer #1), Donald Heng (ENCOM Engineer #2), Tiffany Tong (ENCOM Engineer #3), Sakura Sykes (Athena’s Red Guard #1), Lilian Leopold (Athena’s Red Guard #2), Brian Ho (Athena’s Red Guard #3), Curtis Lovell (Police Officer #1), Cameron Park (Grid Tech #1), Leigh Dickson (Grid Tech #2), Kenneth Tynan (Gas Station Clerk), Elizabeth Bowen (ENCOM Security), Bella Poarch (Paranoia-Con Emcee), Leo Chiang (Dillinger Security #2),
Brent Connolly (Dillinger Security #3), Trent Reznor (F-35 Pilot #1), Atticus Ross (F-35 Pilot #2), Shannon Leto (Pizza Parlor Patron), Miru Kim (young Eve Kim), Narsha Kim (young Tess Kim), Selene Yun (Tess Kim), Jovana Lara (1980s News Anchor), Curt Sandoval (himself), Jaclyn Lee (herself), Trevor Ault (himself), Zohreen Shah (herself), A. Martinez (Field Reporter #1), Adrianna Weingold (Field Reporter #2), Monroe Robertson (News Anchor #6), Jordan Schultz (Reporter #1), Marke Driesschen (Reporter #2), Yvonne Schalle (Reporter #3), Ana Paula Corpus (Mom), Paulo Gonzalez Corpus (Kid), Nduduzo Leroy Hikwa (Backstage AD), Catherine Haena Kim (Tess Kim voice), Ashlyn Woodruff (Baby in car), Dhillyn Woodruff (Baby in car), Phil Cater (ENCOM Video Narrator)
Review: A bit of full disclosure – I’m not a huge Jared Leto fan, either as an actor or as a person, so this movie had a tremendous uphill climb to win me over. That and a lot of the early publicity talking about how it’s not very tightly connected to its predecessors in the Tron franchise set the bar incredibly low going in. In the end, I was a bit stunned at how much I did enjoy it.
The story is actually much more interconnected to the previous movies than the trailers and previews let on, but to be fair, the strategy behind the movie’s publicity seemed to be “concentrate all fire on the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack“, and the trailers seemed to be more like music videos than traditional trailers. (Some of this was probably meant to draw focus away from Leto’s involvement, and let’s give Disney some credit here, it probably worked.) Upon learning of the lack of permanence early in the movie, my thoughts immediately turned to Quorra, who emerged from the grid with Sam Flynn at the end of Tron Legacy and though I didn’t expect to see or hear about her in Tron Ares, there was indeed a very big hint that she’s still around right at the end of movie, potentially setting up a further sequel (watch this space in 15 years). I didn’t expect to hear anything about Sam. And I was a bit surprised to see Jeff Bridges still playing the role of the ever-more-Dude-esque elder Flynn. The amount of time given over to a visit to the original grid surprised me, as did the amount of Wendy Carlos music that accompanied it – if you’ve got Nine Inch Nails on the payroll, why not have a NIN interpretation of the Wendy Carlos score, rather than a needle drop?
Does the movie lean too heavily on references to the original Tron? Only in places where the writer thought they were being clever with it: repeating dialogue from 1982 like “it’s all in the wrists” and “Here goes nothing”/”here goes something” made very little sense in context. But other than the extended visit to Flynn in a vintage ’82 light cycle (and a vintage ’82 bit), the movie takes its visual lexicon from Tron Legacy (this movie finally owns up to what I’ve always known deep down: Recognizers are just MWADs, i.e. Maximillian With A Driver), and the soundtrack’s grinding noises and jagged edges are much more suited to this story than trying to find the next Daft Punk. So it looks good, it sounds interesting, it does, in fact, click into the rest of the lore surprisingly well… what about the rest?
The unsung hero of the movie – completely drowned out by Leto’s starring credit – is Greta Lee. She is carrying the entire emotional weight of the story on her back, and she knocks it out of the park. Her backstory data dump at the beginning of the movie is perhaps a bit inelegant, but she at least makes it feel as though Eve Kim is a real person with real concerns and real tragedy behind her. And that’s essential, because it seems as though most of the movie’s other characters have a single lane from which they do not deviate: Leto’s Ares is an evolving tabula rasa with a sense of wonder and curiosity, Julian Dillinger is a ranting, amoral tech-bro who has had far too little adult supervision, and Athena is single-minded rage personified. Jeff Bridges? He’s the Dude, but he’s a Grid Dude. You can tell that bringing in someone of Gillian Anderson’s stature was meant to lend her character some gravitas, but Dillinger’s mother is another frustrating blank slate. She’s obviously failed as a parent, but her only emotional note is to admonish Julian and glance forlornly at a lovely painting of the late David Warner, as if that’s supposed to tell us something. (Left completely off the table: the character of Ed Dillinger Jr. from Tron Legacy, who would by now be quite a bit older than Julian, so surely not the same character.) Everyone else is stuck in one gear, leaving Greta Lee to show all the emotional beats.
Evan Peters does do a great job of making Julian Dillinger utterly contemptible. Just when you think that witnessing his mother’s death has somehow broken his resolve to keep doing detestable things, he sends himself to the grid to avoid facing up to setting in motion the events that killed her. That part – which plays out in a Marvel-esque mid-credits zinger – seems to be trying to set up a further sequel, though the box office for Ares thus far has been dismal to say the least; even Peters, when asked if he’ll be involved in any sequels that may yet happen, made a joke of the lengthy wait between movies, advising the interviewer to ask him again in 20 years.
That brings me to this point: as tantalizing as the threads might be of Sam and Quorra still being up to something out there in the real world, is it perhaps time to completely reboot Tron as a franchise and start from the beginning, and do it properly this time? That this third movie bolts onto the existing lore as well as it does is more by coincidence than by design; it’s well-known that a more direct follow-up to Legacy was submerged in development, during a time when Disney was directing all resources toward putting as much Marvel and Star Wars stuff into the streaming pipeline to keep the Disney+ subscriber numbers up. Just like the promising animated show Tron Uprising was sacrificed so its budget could instead be directed toward Star Wars Rebels (which I also enjoyed), any time something has to take a hit for the team under Disney’s IP umbrella, it’s always Tron.
But what if they started from scratch, with an overarching plan for 2-3 movies and maybe something for the streaming ecosystem, and probably a video game or two, and committed to that plan? You wouldn’t have to dispose of the visual look of either classic or 21st century Tron, but you’d have to accept that we’re probably not going to see Jeff Bridges, and we might see actors other than the sainted Bridges & Boxleitner, who have surely done their time in the Tron trenches, filling iconic roles. 
Tron Ares was better than I expected, but it’d be neat to see a bit more forethought put into the franchise as a whole. It has an iconic look and a real claim to milestones in cinematic history. It holds together because folks like me who have been hip-deep in the lore since 1982 do some of the work to stitch it together and make sense of it for those not so lucky. The fans – and probably lots of people who could yet become fans – are just waiting for it to be treated like something other than a stepchild who has to get by on the bigger franchises’ table scraps.
LogBook entry & review by Earl Green