But Like ... What *Is* TRON?

No, for real ... what *is* Tron?

What … is this?

Folks, I watched TRON: ARES¹, the underperforming third entry in the now-decades-long Disney series, and let me be the four-thousandth to tell you it’s not good. It’s not bad exactly - not overall, anyway, though a million of its decisions and details are bad - but it’s not good. It’s sort of not … anything.

But I don’t know what it really could have been, because, like … what even is TRON?

I’m a member of Generation: Tron - I was five when the first one² came out, had the toys, the storybook, the frisbee, the whatever, and so you’d think I’d be in the tank for this … except really, just the opposite.

Because when you come right down to it, like … what is Tron?

It was a fun fantasia speculating about the mysterious new frontier that The Computer presented in 1982, while pushing that frontier forward with how computers could be used to visualize the imagination. And that’s great for 1982.

Then came Tron: Legacy³, which mostly existed to reimagine that world with 30 years of improved technology, and pull some money out of moribund IP. The fact that it gave us an excellent new Daft Punk score didn’t hurt, but it also distracted us from Legacy’s failure to answer what it was, and by extension never really justified its existence.

Vague Holy Trinity allusions aside, it was a largely recursive story, more interested in its own world(s) than in anything to do with ours, which by that point had us all walking around with more computing power in our pockets than were available to create the entire original movie.

That recursion kept it from even trying to match the original’s most important legacy - pushing the limits of how computers can be used to render the only-imaginary into a plausible reality; Legacy’s obsidian-glass esthetic looked great in IMAX … but wasn’t really anything we hadn’t seen before.

And now, fifteen years later, they’ve given us more Tron, built on the public’s general affection for - or non-objection to - the franchise and shareholder demand for a Thanksgiving tentpole. For their troubles, they wind up with a boil-in-bag blockbuster from the unremarkable director behind the least-remarkable Pirates of the Caribbean, splashing money around to get Jeff Cronenweth to make it look gorgeous while punching below his weight, and NIN to turn in their least surprising or interesting score to date, and then putting it behind the face of a box-office-poison sex pest whose most prominent lead role only sticks in the memory for how hard it got meme-dunked and then tried to laugh along with the joke.

The “HEY LOOK AT MEEEEEEE!” nods to Syd Mead, Moebius and Akira⁴ (all within five seconds) made my eye twitch so hard it broke my glasses. Likewise the back half of the second act which drops Leto into the Grid from the 1982 original, leaning so hard into fanservice in a project whose entire existence isn’t much more than a costly act of fanservice to begin with.

Now I’m going to try and say a few nice things about it, results likely to be mixed:

• Keanu Reeves as Ares couldn’t have saved this but would have brought some charm to it, and would have turned Ares’ scene with Flynn into an intergenerational Stoner HoF moment, so it’s nice to think about it.

• Jeff Bridges is always welcome, and I’m glad he got paid.

• Nice that the series finally discovered the existence of Black ppl - and Jodie Turner Smith is a genuine presence - even if they just made the one Black person an implacable villain. Baby steps? A far better use of the available talent would have been to give Ares’s midpoint face-turn (a hard sell with the always unlikable Leto) to Turner-Smith’s Athena, partnering her with Greta Lee versus the, again, entirely unlikable, impossible-to-root-for Leto.

• The digital whistles and bells did their job well enough to distract me for like an hour from the fact that the “permanence code” McGuffin is just a reheated weak-piss version of Blade Runner’s central argument about asking our creator for more time, stripped here of any complexity or moral grays, and instead reduced to pat “use the time you’ve got!” platitudes.

As much as I detest generative A.I. (and I really do), I almost wish Disney had gone whole-hog and made this as the first totally gen A.I. feature - it would have probably been just as bad, but at least it might not have wasted some talented people’s time, and revolting as the idea is, it would at least have been a big swing.

And despite being as insubstantive as any piece of gen-A.I., this hypothetical iteration would have at least had an answer - even a dissatisfying one - for what Tron is.

1. Tron: Ares - Dir: Joachim Rønning; W: Screenplay by Jesse Wigutow; Story by Wigutow & David DiGilio; Based on characters by Steven Lisberger & Bonnie MacBird; Prod: Sean Bailey, Jared Leto, Emma Ludbrook, Lisberger; DP: Jeff Cronenweth; Ed: Tyler Nelson; Composer: Nine Inch Nails; Disney (2025).

2. Tron - Dir: Steven Lisberger; W: Screenplay by Lisberger; Story by Lisberger & MacBird; Prod: Donald Kushner; DP: Bruce Logan; Ed: Jeff Gourson; Composer: Wendy Carlos; Disney (1982).

3. Tron: Legacy - Dir: Joseph Kosinski; W. Screenplay by Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz; story by Kitsis, Horowitz, Brian Klugman, Lee Sternthal; Based on characters by Steven Lisberger & Bonnie MacBird; Prod: Bailey, Lisberger, Jeffrey Silver; DP: Claudio Miranda; Ed: James Haygood; Composer: Daft Punk; Disney (2010).

4. Akira - Dir: Katsuhiro Ôtomo; W. Screenplay by Ôtomo & Izô Hashimoto; based on the manga by Ôtomo; Prod: Shunzô Katô, Ryôhei Suzuki; DP: Katsuji Misawa; Ed: Takeshi Seyama; Composer: Shôji Yamashiro; Toho (1988).