The original Tron movie was created at a time when computers were still a new and scary thing. So it was a story in which a man was digitized and brought into a computer world. The video game Tron 2.0 and a tie-in game, Killer App, would go there again. Tron: Legacy would introduce The Grid, a virtual world that made more sense now that computers are such a part of our normal lives, and it would be the focus of the short-lived and incomplete animated series Tron: Uprising. This and other tie-in media has created a franchise that has survived by being sparse.
Now we have a third movie coming up. From the trailer, it looks like Tron: Ares either has Clu winning or someone winning in his place by getting the digital armies of The Grid into our world and causing mayhem. There isn’t much of a story available now, but let’s take a look.
First question I have to ask is why they’re going with Nine Inch Nails for their music. Previous Tron universe tales, and “Tron” is now a brand since the character has long left the franchise, used computerized music, fitting for the setting. Daft Punk is no longer a team, so they wouldn’t be brought back, but it’s not like that style of music has disappeared. If anything, synthwave and offshoots like spacesynth (which I’m listening to as I write this) are still quite popular forms of music and there are plenty of performers to choose from on the internet. Some of them might even work cheaper than someone like Daft Punk just to get out there to a wider audience and say they were part of a Tron movie. (And you know Disney would screw them over sideways, too.)
What do we really know about the movie? All we have from Disney is “Tron: Ares follows a highly sophisticated program, Ares, who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.” The Tron section of the Disney wiki (and this is going to be outdated in the archives someday as we learn more about the film) tells us Jeff Bridges will return, presumably as Kevin Flynn or it could be Clu if he survived Legacy somehow/ The new main character is a girl (because of course it is) named Eve Kim. She’ll be a computer genius who makes friends but not a romantic connection with Ares, which is also normal lately because many critics are noticing straight romances are on the decline in action movies along with masculine male leads, but at the same time…he’s a living computer program. I didn’t want to see Sam Flynn, Kevin’s son who is not in this movie by the way and seems to have gone the way of the games’ Jet Bradley except Sam is still canon) get together with Quorra for the same reason. Flynn kissing Yori is weird for that reason and because he essentially introduced kissing to the computer world as Tron was as confused as she was when she kissed him. I don’t go to this series for human on program action, so I’ll live on this one.
Of course Kim is “one of the best computer programmers” because girls in STEM is a goal for some reason. I just want the best people in things. I don’t care what their body parts and skin color are like. We also have a special forces agent named Athena, which you’d think would be a computer world name, but we know nothing about Ares. We do know this about Athena, or at least this is what the wiki has listed as of this writing:
Imposing, cold and officious, driven solely by an innate urge. Open to fulfill any directive she is given without question, Athena is a member of an elite special forces unit and second in command. When Athena senses her superior has strayed from their assignment, she reports him without hesitation and quickly assumes his leadership role, intent on destroying him and fulfilling the directive at all costs. With incredible power and the inability to fear or doubt, Athena is nearly an unstoppable force, and a tragic figure.
She was also Mother Aniseya in Star Wars: The Acolyte, which isn’t a boost for this movie. Meanwhile, the other bio we have is Canus: “A battle worn soldier who suddenly experiences fear during an open battle and begins to question the meaning of war. His superior witnesses this unprecedented behavior and shows him sympathy.” Yes, what we come to a TRON movie for, a “war is bad” tale. Geez. Meanwhile, the only antagonist listed, depending on who Bridges ultimately plays, is Julian Dillinger. All we know at this time is he exists, not if he’s the son (would be my guess) or other relative of Ed Dillinger, the meat world antagonist of the first movie. That makes the lack of Flynn and Alan’s sons (I want Jet to be canon, okay!) even more disappointing. By rights one or both of them should be the heroes of this story, not some random programmer with no connection to anybody, especially if we’re getting one of the heroes and offspring of a villain from the first movie…and please don’t let them pull an Emperor Palpatine and tell us the Master Control Program is back. Clu I could tolerate if it comes from The Grid, which as Uprising indicated has further story potential, but not going back to the ENCOM computer and the MCP.
Well, research damaged my interest in the movie. The effects look cool but only in the nighttime setting of the movie, so who knows how it will look in the day if they ever show up in daylight. I want Tron: Ares to be good. I want everything I talk about to be good, but current Disney does not give me hope that it will be. Their reputation is too screwed up by this point and what I’m reading, if accurate and not just false rumor or something changed in one of 15+ reshoots, is not helping.
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