Tron: Ares has nothing to say, but with stunning design and music

Tron is truly a strange franchise, which with Ares reaches the enviable status of a trilogy over forty years after its foundational chapter but which is difficult to define as a true franchise. Not because the three Tron films lack a coherent and recognizable aesthetic and construction of the sci-fi world in which the story is set: on the contrary, it's exactly the opposite. Ares, for example, not only picks up where Tron: Legacy left off in 2010, making the design of its vehicles and the Grid even more stylish, even more seductive and refined (there's a monumental amount of visual effects work behind it, as the endless credits attest). The film also manages to reconnect and update the aesthetic of the first Tron from 1982, returning to the dimension of bites, squared lines, and '80s neon colors, far from the black duopoly in contrast with the red and blue lasers of the 2010s of its rebirth. From a production standpoint, Tron: Ares fully leverages its $180 million budget (according to Variety), presenting its viewer with a result that often, in terms of effects, approaches the state of the art in the industry, infinitely better than many other far more acclaimed and even more expensive blockbusters.

Does the Tron franchise really exist?

Yet Tron: Ares struggles to reinforce the idea that a Tron franchise exists and that anyone cares about it, instead giving the impression that it's dusted off like a program saved on an old floppy disk whenever needed, but for practical reasons, without real narrative motivations, and above all without the slightest emotional involvement. Starting from those who produce, finance, and distribute Ares, there's no passion behind the project, except in theory. In itself, it's not a flaw; in fact, in recent years, the evolution of directors, screenwriters, and producers into passionate individuals with creative control has caused quite a bit of damage. Ares, however, lacks vital energy, communicative urgency, leaving behind it in the viewer's mind a luminous trail that vanishes upon leaving the theater.

Tron: Ares also finds itself having to dust off very dusty memories: it arrives fifteen years after the previous one, to which it refers in the long initial recap and in the final mid-credit scene, then focusing on brand new characters starting with the heroine Greta Lee, suspended between the role of a visionary CEO, capable hacker, and potential action hero. She is at the head of ENCOM when the company is about to develop a revolutionary technology, which brings into the world of Tron not a futuristic video game dream, but the technological anxieties of the present: artificial intelligence and the potential for it to become sentient and be turned into a weapon by some unscrupulous company. Jared Leto embodies a defense software named Ares, in his own way perfect with his persona and his appearance never marred by the passage of time to play a software that has become corporeal, entered the real world.

This is the reversal on which Tron's main novelty is based: this time it's the Grid world that colonizes reality, cutting fast aboard its futuristic motorcycles as their luminous trails streak through the city. Directing these long night races through the streets of an American metropolis is the Norwegian Joachim Rønnin, who cites the inevitable side slide of Akira's motorcycles, pays homage to the first Tron, and generally delivers sequences of undeniable, yet empty, sci-fi elegance.

There are two problems: the characters are like software, well-programmed to perform the functions of a minimal and very specious story, but completely incapable of complex emotions. Furthermore, the film suffers from that "Pacific Rim effect" where a romantic tension is built between its protagonists, only to then completely ignore it, leaving them suspended at the end, looking at each other and wondering if perhaps... With the aggravating factor that this much-suggested but never-explored relationship would actually be an interesting plot twist that the film clearly needs: a human programmer who falls in love with software developed by a rival company. Instead, no, Tron: Ares continues in a direction that moves from dystopia to utopia, without emotional impact, without any impact at all, relying entirely on being beautiful, but not caring about being empty.

A superficial beauty made up of many high-quality elements that is sometimes a double-edged sword: just think of the much-publicized soundtrack by NIN. It's not surprising that it's captivating and capable of amplifying the film's atmosphere, but such a captivating, such a protagonist beat is not easy to manage. Not everyone, in short, has the personality and charisma of a Luca Guadagnino, capable of holding his own against a stunning soundtrack like that of Challengers (by the same authors, already a cult), of exploiting its strength but bending it to his will. Joachim Rønnin often succumbs to the soundtrack's prominence, whose musical charisma devours many chase and action scenes, as if depowering them, slowing them down.