Tron: Ares: Movie Review

Cast: Jared Leto, Gillian Anderson, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith

Director: Joachim Rønning

Some 43 years after the very first Tron movie introduced the Grid, it's back to its world for this latest that ties in some timely ideas about AI worries.

Suicide Squad's Jared Leto plays Ares, a programme unleashed on the real world and who has a secret mission to fulfil.

Tron:Ares wilfully cribs elements from many other sci-fi films and TV series, cobbling together a story that's largely driven by its pounding Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.

But in between the elements of chase  scenes and retro touches to the original 80s film, there's a feeling of a movie that's got a vision, but not quite a voice.

Visually, its hyperstylised world is a cosplayer and fetishist dream,with vibrant oranges and reds glistening against a dull background of greys and grimness.

It's a fairly simple story - in the collision of the digital and real worlds, there are two warring CEOs trying to be the first to turn the digital into the eternal, thanks to a MacGuffin called a permanence code. On one side is Dillinger CEO Julian Dillinger (American Horror Story's Evan Peters), a tech geek with a god complex and on the other is Greta Lee as Eve, the head of Encom, the good guys. (Let's leave aside the allegory of Eve bringing life to the digital world by taking fruit from a laser-printed tree, one of the film's less than subtle nods).

In the middle of this is Jared Leto's Ares and Jodie Turner-Smith's Athena, a pair of programmes made to protect the grid and deemed infinitely disposable by Dillinger who's touting them as military breakthroughs (despite the frosty annoyance of his mother, a role that largely wastes Gillian Anderson) and who toys with them.

When Ares discovers a degree of sentience thanks to experiencing rain (a Pinocchio boy who longs to be real and Blade Runner-visual - yet another on-the-nose scripting moment), he finds himself caught in the war between CEOs.

More a mixed bag than raging success (unless you're a Depeche Mode fan), director Rønning's Tron: Ares has a visual flair that's bolstered by a blistering soundtrack.

Leto brings a calm to the corniness, a Zen alternative to Turner-Smith's bombastic warmonger (who gets a Blade Runner visual and literal send-off) and Peters largely feels ripped from the sci-fi tech genius cliche that is so readily used in films like this to disappointing effect.

But Lee emerges as the star of this, a human touch in a world that's most rendered with pixel-level basics. With empathy, warmth and necessary humour, she takes charge thanks to a story that doesn't leave her with scraps.

Ultimately, Tron: Ares emerges as something that's worth watching thanks to its visual flair, but with a story that feels like it's largely sequel-baiting (particularly in its dying moments), there's a distinctly frustrating feeling that unless the Grid revamps its narrative, it's Game Over for the series.