Welcome to a movie with no character arcs whatsoever! Sit back, relax, look at the pretty colors, and succumb to the nostalgia. (I hope you like Nine Inch Nails.)
Ares, despite the militaristic name, which is explained in dialog in case you’re not familiar with the Greek gods, clearly just wants to be human from the start. That’s why I claim he’s got no character arc. The physical manifestation of ARES, a military tech company’s “master control” security program, he undergoes a brutal training process, then, as part of a sales demo, gets 3D-printed by a bunch of lasers (because lasers… create matter?), whereupon he marvels at the natural phenomenon of rain, in spite of the fact that he was created by a ruthless, power-hungry CEO for the purpose of following orders, which primarily involve stealing valuable information from another company. Like, where did appreciation of nature even come from? And why would being told that he’s “100% expendable” hurt his feelings? He’s not supposed to have any!
Why am I supposed to believe that Dillinger, the ruthless, power-hungry CEO, knows anything about programming, never mind enough to be able to create a uniquely human and distinctly benevolent artificial consciousness, apparently by accident? His strategy throughout the movie is to desperately type and/or shout commands in the hope of succeeding in stealing someone else’s innovation before his lies are exposed and his business crumbles. While we’re on the subject of Dillinger, he’d have been more believable if he’d been depicted as having more emotional range. When someone he cares about is brutally attacked, it still never seems to occur to him that choices—in particular, his choices—have consequences. He should be horrified. Instead, we get: angry incompetent man is angry and incompetent. Yeah, thanks, we knew that already.
Eve doesn’t grow much either. Okay, we eventually learn she wanted to quit her job that she’s had forever because she’s depressed about losing someone, and then she decides not to, I guess because she’s finished grieving or she’ll always have the memories, or because her loved one wouldn’t want her to quit or something. But mostly she’s just running around with the MacGuffin (well, she *is* the MacGuffin) trying not to get killed. She didn’t even create the thing she’s trying to protect.
The fruit of Eve’s (well, not hers, her sister’s) tree of knowledge is an orange. It seems the movie is trying to say that eating the apple was sinful but these are oranges, so it’s okay. Actually, I wondered what would happen if a human ate something that was 3D printed but unstable. The movie doesn’t explore this, it just shows 3D-printed “people” gradually crumbling and in pain, and shows tanks and other equipment suddenly collapsing into crumbs. It would have shown Eve’s belief in the “permanence code” if she had eaten a fruit that would have collapsed and killed her if the code had failed. She and her sidekick drink juice from the oranges… after it’s already clear that the permanence code is working. That’s not the same. Maybe the reason they chose an orange tree for the movie is that it’s harder to make apple juice on one’s private jet, and anyway apple juice would be a weirder liquid to mix with celebratory champagne.
Athena isn’t a character. She just follows orders. I don’t even think she chooses to follow orders, so I can’t classify her as a loyal henchman; if you literally can’t betray your boss, then you can’t be loyal, either. I was confused why they chose to call her Athena, because I think of Ares as the “god of war” and Athena as the “goddess of wisdom.” Then I was like, Oh, yeah, she is a war goddess, actually… But I wish they’d flipped the two characters. If this movie had been Tron: Athena, and Athena turned out to be humanistically enlightened, that would have made more sense! Instead, we get a robotically violent Athena and an awakened Ares. Maybe someone out there has written a gender-flipped fanfic that addresses this issue.
This movie wasn’t subtle. Disney even name-drops Pinocchio, who also wanted to give up a kind of immortality in exchange for being “real”, and Ares learns about and compares himself to Frankenstein’s monster. But Tron: Ares wasn’t meant to be subtle, or realistic; Hollywood never depicts giant server rooms or the activity of “hacking” with realism. It wouldn’t if it could. That’s not the point. The point is, the special effects looked cool. I think the coolest thing I noticed was the… X-wings? Those things that drew sets of four solid stripes in the air that cut off the wings of the US fighter planes that were trying to defend the city. TBH I was confused about those stripes, though. Clearly they’re dangerous. They disappear after a while, so… are they electrical, like they were when they were in the computer world? Eve bangs her fists on them and they don’t hurt her, so I guess not. One slices a police car in half. So are they really sharp, but only at the edges? Then why would you need to avoid running into their surfaces, as in the game? Are they only dangerous if you’re going fast? I guess I thought they would be more consistently lethal.
In the positive column, alongside the special effects, there’s the 80s nostalgia: the color scheme inside Flynn’s old computer, that Depeche Mode song, and the elements from the original Tron movie are powerful stuff.
So yeah, Tron: Ares is okay if you go in with the right expectations, but my overall impression is that Ares, Eve, and Dillinger don’t make enough sense as characters for this to be what I’d call a good movie. IMO, the story of Ares would have been better if he’d really been a blank slate, totally amoral and unquestioning, until encountering some sort of dilemma, then choosing “badly” (by human standards), then encountering a human who models ethical behavior, then realizing, with the benefit of hindsight, that he made a terrible mistake, and only then starting to act like a human being with feelings.
Okay, maybe Ares, for some reason, is not like all the other programs, and that has to be clear from the start. Fine. Compared to Ares, though, “Blue Shirt Guy” in Free Guy (2021) is a million times more plausible as an inherently kind, gradually self-aware AI hero; he was a labor of love, not of automated combative machine learning. Ryan Gosling played both Guy in Free Guy and Officer K in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), another better-written story that, like Pinocchio and Frankenstein, plays with the idea of personhood. The Last Unicorn (1982) does a good job of transforming something inhuman into something human. At the end of the movie, the immortal title character has something only humans have: a feeling of regret. This feeling of regret makes her absolutely unique, and, uncoincidentally, gives the story its power.
