Time: 119 Minutes
Age Rating: M – Violence
Cast:
Jared Leto as Ares
Greta Lee as Eve Kim
Evan Peters as Julian Dillinger
Jodie Turner-Smith as Athena
Hasan Minhaj as Ajay Singh
Arturo Castro as Seth Flores
Gillian Anderson as Elisabeth Dillinger
Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn
Director: Joachim Rønning

A third Tron movie has been in demand for the past 15 years ever since Tron: Legacy. Even though we are finally getting it with Tron: Ares, I had mixed feelings about it from the trailers. Eventually I did watch it, and I enjoyed it in spite of its many problems.

I found the script to be clunky, uneven and messy, with awkward and stilted dialogue, especially when it comes to the humour. It certainly shoves in a lot of ideas, but doesn’t really utilize them the best or do much with them. I wouldn’t say that the story is bad and I was still interested enough to see what would happen next, but it was definitely generic and didn’t have too many surprises. It’s a shame that the most interesting stuff happens in the third act, right as the movie is heading towards its conclusion.

The cast on the whole is pretty good. Greta Lee is decent enough as one of the protagonists, Evan Peters is good as one of the main villains, and Jeff Bridges is reliably solid in his small screentime as the only returning Tron character and actor. Jodie Turner-Smith is the standout and has a lot of presence in her scenes. I wished we got even more of her in the movie but she does a lot in her part. The actor who was most out of place was unfortunately playing the titular character, that being Jared Leto. He was fine at the beginning when he was playing Ares as a very robotic and stiff program. However, when Ares was going through his arc of discovering life, learning about what it means to be human, doing quirky jokes and talking about how he loves the 80s, it felt awkward and unconvincing. Part of it was that Leto still felt very robotic and stiff even in those scenes, but even the writing for Ares wasn’t great. There have been instances of AI and robotic characters going through arcs of discovering what it’s like being human, but with Ares, his development is incredibly rushed so you don’t really get to see that change happen on screen

Joachim Rønning’s direction was mostly decent, even if it’s not quite on the level of Joseph Kosinski’s work on Tron: Legacy. Outside of many of the daylight non-grid scenes, it’s a vibrant visual feast. The action was enjoyable to watch and there was some really good sound design. The highlight for me was the amazing score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, it was the part of the movie I was most looking forward to and it really elevated the whole experience for me.

Tron: Ares is unfortunately rather generic and messy, but still enjoyable with a mostly solid cast, entertaining action, and a fantastic soundtrack.