Tron - Ares : The best movie about 3D printing EVAR
What it is: A sequel/reboot of Tron and Tron - Legacy
What it isn't: Did you know that NIN did the soundtrack for this movie?
Soundtrack? Did you know that NIN did the soundtrack for this movie? Truly chestthumping and ass shaking.
The visuals? Gorgeous.
The fight scenes? So Amazing.
I could keep going on about NIN, but I think that joke's been about beaten to death by now.
Any time a work of fiction tries to span naivete and brilliance and the creation mythos, you wind up with a cross between Pygmalion and Flowers for Algernon or Frankenstein or ye olde Adam and Eve.
This isn't new territory, as even modern movies from the 80s onwards have had a go at it: Weird Science, Real Genius, The Matrix, Pixels, Star Trek TNG (Data), Star Trek Voyager (7 of 9), Aliens etc
Is it worth watching? It's certainly entertaining.
I did spend a good chunk of time with my arms flying up at the screen in frustration and shaking my head with frustration from time to time, until the NIN soundtrack kicks in and all of the awesome visuals start again.
What about the plot? I hate to think everything is AI slop, but this feels like AI slop after it was fed the all of the tropes from tvtropes.org related to Tron and The Matrix plus toss in the usual Die Hard equivalences. But at least it's well curated.
If you were looking for fan service, there's a bit of that, but it's pretty superficial in feeling and far removed from the sequel but still super cool.
Jeff Bridges exudes more "The Dude" than Kevin Flynn, but maybe Kevin Flynn was proto "The Dude" with less weed.
It's not one grid, but rather each company has its own grid. This is separate from the open internet
Jared Leto does his best with the material at hand, but the writing is so uneven that he launches from an innocent to fully immersed into the human world and back and forth without the notion of boundaries, until the plot needs it. Ares as a character is like a cross between Morbius and Niander Wallace of Blade Runner 2049 but with the sweeter aspects of Joker.
It's still not as execrable as Kraven the Hunter, which is of course a backhanded compliment worthy of being dished out by Gillian Anderson like an epic pimp-slap.
There's also a few moments where it feels like there was a subplot about internal betrayal/intrigue at Encom, but that appears to have been cut or reshot.
When the film is not in awesome music video game cinematic mode, or cringey conversation mode, then it's almost inevitable that so much time is spent looking through text and video files and status screens in cool ways that ultimately remind me of the memory balls in Inside Out but get more from the current extant smartphone/social media life.
The humor is at least thankfully intentional for the most part.
At least they did use actual Linux/Unix style CLI commands at one point, including SUDO!
There is also a mid credits scene, which in many ways rescues the movie from the straight good guy/bad guy plot in a twist worthy of M Night Shyamalan.
If the programs in Encom's grid are "good" and worth saving, then what about the poor programs in Dilinger's grid? Worthy of the movie ending genocidal first strike?
It's like, what about all of the poor outsourced maintenance workers and contractors onsite at the Death Star, trying to finish up that installation and post-sales support like those poor Hyundai-LG contractors in Georgia?
At least we got to see Sark 3.0
So, how could this movie be summed up? (Keep in mind I'm of Korean descent as I say this, but this is kind of like my Uncle Roger take)
You know that South Park meme with Cartman complaining about Kathleen Kennedy going too far for diversity? It almost feels like that.
White dude lead
Asian leading lady (Korean, to help cash in on that current trend)
Second white dude tech bro lead
Black lady supporting cast member with lots of lines and plot importance
Latino dude supporting cast member with lots of funny lines (the funny bad guy from the RoadHouse reboot)
South Asian hacker dude boss man/VP (Hasan Minaj)
Angry old white lady who pimp-slaps somebody (Gillian Anderson)
I nearly lost it when the female lead's biographical file popped up and the father's name is the same as my brother-in-law's name. They really leaned a bit too hard into having the character be authentically Korean. They even went so far as to stick with a non iPhone, which is totally unrealistic.
Then the summary of the movie could conceivably be seen as the following:
A morality play to show overly studious and hard working geeky Asian girls that look like Peanuts' gang Marcie, that sacrifice their lives for a career, can eventually wind up with handsome hunky wild white boyfriend that looks like Jesus, and can be tamed even though super dangerous, and then give you space to boost your career until he's ready to settle down.
My daughter died laughing when I told her this.
Don't worry, no PDA, so it will be fine for the Asian market too without any editing.
You could also go down the path of deconstructing it for comparisons to slavery, but that's pretty depressing so I won't.
For fans of NIN? Awesome video wrapper for the music, maybe 8.5 out of 10. There were a few wonky screeching sounds for soundtrack that took it down.
For fans of Tron? Lots of fan service including 2 outright cameos, but ultimately this felt like an awesome NIN music video with some dumb dialogue thrown in. Maybe a 7.5 because some things were so outright visually cool.
For movie fans who want to see cool stuff and stuff blowing up with epic soundtrack? That's a 9 out of 10. Just ignore the dialogue once it starts being more than 7 words in a sentence.
