Tron: Ares Fails To Find Permanence

Dylan Z. Alter ’29 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

While attempts have been made to turn the cult classic 1982 film Tron into a franchise for decades, no project has seemed to stick. 2010’s Tron: Legacy, while a well-made successor to the original, failed to capture audience’s attention and has since fallen into obscurity along with its predecessor. Several attempts at Tron franchise television shows and video games have been made, but most were cancelled soon after release. Despite being a household name to many, Tron has never seemed to hold much sticking power in the worldwide scene.

Tron: Ares was supposed to break that trend. For better or worse, it has not.

Spoilers ahead.

The film opens with a wall of exposition explaining every piece of necessary detail from the first two films. Programmer and game designer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), creator of a wide-spanning computer network/virtual world known as The Grid, is missing, as is his son, Sam. Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of Tron’s main villain, Edward Dillinger, has created his own version of The Grid. He has also created a program, dubbed Ares (Jared Leto), to act as his Grid’s chief of security. Dillinger has developed technology to bring programs like Ares and his suite of weaponized vehicles into the real world to sell to the United States military.

However, he can only send them out for twenty nine minutes before they dematerialize back into The Grid. Dillinger’s goal is to either develop or locate Permanence—lines of code that will allow Ares and the rest of his security detail to remain in the real world forever.

While in a remote corner of Alaska, Eve Kim (Greta Lee), CEO of Kevin Flynn’s company ENCOM, has already found the Permanence code on an old floppy disc belonging to Kevin. With the code in hand, she returns to her headquarters, just as Dillinger sends Ares and his second-in-command Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) after her. What follows is a race against time to ensure that Dillinger does not get the Permanence code. As Ares starts to wish to live in the real world, he develops human emotions that distract him from following orders.

Throughout the film, two questions repeatedly sprang to mind: why and how? Tron: Ares plays fast and loose with previously established canon, choosing instead to focus squarely on two things: the relationship with Ares and Eve Kim, and Ares’ desire to live in the real world. Both come out of nowhere, and neither are ever fully explained. Ares’ humanistic longing is established when he senses rain for the first time, and then again when he starts spying on Eve from within The Grid. This parasocial relationship develops into an actual one when the two meet and form an alliance as Ares—so far nothing more than a silent, tortured, action hero—starts throwing around quips left and right, talking about loving Depeche Mode, a band we as the audience have never seen him listen to before this point. 

It’s a jarring change, and one that is almost completely thrown out by the film’s third act.

Still, unlike Ares, Eve has no character of her own. Everything about her—specifically her desire to change the world and debating quitting her job at ENCOM—is revealed to the audience by Ares and subsequently ignored, leaving her as a static figure with nothing to do but run from assailants.

The villains don’t fare much better in this regard, either. Julian Dillinger is a man-child who gets into arguments with his mother over how he should get to play with his toys—only his toys are computer generated superweapons. He creates his own version of The Grid seemingly only to allow the film to show off how red it can be. Peters is clearly doing his best, but neither his stone-faced cruelty nor his over-the-top shouting are effective here.

As stated before, the rules and history of the Tron world are almost completely ignored. Nobody at ENCOM seems to realize the extent of The Grid, which in both Tron and Tron: Legacy was shown to be an entire virtual world. Tron: Legacy even went so far as introducing a government with factions within The Grid. What does Tron: Ares do with this world? 

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

Instead, Tron: Ares makes its own Grid—one that only serves to house Ares, his gear, and his crew—and is only shown twice in the entire movie. The Dillinger Grid is shut down by the end of the film, and Kevin’s Grid is never explored.

Another thing Tron: Ares ignores about the Tron series is that The Grid is a world that houses games. Even in the government coup plot of Tron: Legacy, all that programs do in The Grid is play games, which gives the series its iconic Identity Disc frisbee weapons and wall-generating Light Cycles. These elements, alongside a new suite of tanks, drones, and flying machines, are all present in Tron: Ares, but the games are gone, replaced purely with warfare. The Light Cycles, for instance, are used in one chase scene, where Ares and Eve use the walls—large beams of light that act as a physical barrier—to try and slow one another down. The walls are actually used all over the place in Tron: Ares, with all the drones making them as they fly around. Instead of the bright blue, vibrant world of the first two films, Tron: Ares is dark and red. The Dillinger Grid is oppressively red, and shots in the real world take place almost entirely at night, creating a very negative viewing experience.

With the modern-day rise of artificial intelligence programs taking over our lives and taking advantage of our art and creativity, Ares should have been interesting. Instead, it’s boring. What Ares chooses to say on the topic of AI is that we should control it less; when AI systems are allowed to flourish under little regulation—such as Ares—peace is created. This pro-AI stance is a tired trope that is harder and harder to sell given the current state of AI.

Even the idea of AI life forms has been done better elsewhere, such as Quantic Dream’s 2018 video game Detroit: Become Human and Ian Tregillis’ book trilogy The Alchemy Wars. Ares had the perfect opportunity to speak on the subject of artificial life, having already dived into the topic of artificial leadership in Legacy and having a rich virtual world to explore. Instead, the film chooses to introduce something new and barely develop it. In truth, Tron: Ares’s  greatest crime is that it’s bland, boring, and underdeveloped.

Tron: Ares will not be the film to make the franchise a success. It simply does not feel like it cared to be a Tron film, and feels like it developed out of an unrelated, separate project. Bland characters, lazy writing, and ignoring the core elements that make Tron “Tron” outside of the visual aspect do not reflect kindly on the movie.

Not even a mid-credits teaser—which shows Julian entering his grid and assuming a new form reminiscent of the villain from the original Tron—will save the series. Despite its efforts, Tron: Ares will never find permanence.