Disney Didn’t Just Ruin Ares, It Turned Tron Into A Series of Fart Noises And Destroyed It Forever

Disney has never really known what to do with Tron, but now they don’t have to. Tron: Ares is a franchise killer, a movie so bad that no one will want anything from Tron ever again.

Before Ares, if Tron was anything, it was a vibe. A unique aesthetic set to some of the most interesting and exciting music possible. Ares looks like a boring pile of nothing on screen, and the soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails sounds like it’s made up entirely of electronic fart noises played in various tones.

It’s led by one of the worst actresses ever to lead a major movie, and her hiring is one of the great mysteries of the universe. She brings nothing to the table. Her name is Greta Lee, and before Ares, she’d never been the lead in anything good. She still hasn’t.

There’s a reason Ares’s trailers tried to pretend Jared Leto is the movie’s main hero. Every moment Greta’s Eve character is on screen, a little more life is sucked out of the audience.

Maybe she could have been better if the movie had a script, but it doesn’t. Instead, the plot is a series of generic corporate politics mumbo-jumbo bullet points mixed with a few platitudes and some hand-waving about technology. None of it means anything.

There are other characters in the movie. There’s her Mexican sidekick, Seth (Arturo Castro), whose only personality trait is that he likes burritos. There’s also her Indian male helper, Ayjay (Hasan Minhaj), who, like our lead, has no personality.

I’ve made it a point to describe these characters by their ethnicities because that’s the insulting and racist way the movie uses them. They’re beta male diversity props and nothing more. It’s despicable.

The other key player is Jared Leto as Ares. He’s the most interesting thing about the movie, which is like saying the taste is the most interesting thing about paste. Leto poses, looks pretty, and convincingly delivers terrible dialogue about nothing.

The look of Tron: Ares is divided into two halves. There’s the real world, which is a basic, generic city and an office building with some cubicles. It’s so blandly shot that when light cycles leave the game grid and appear in the real world, a moment which should be exciting, they suddenly seem stupid and boring.

The other half is the computer world, which, for this movie, is limited to some vague black and red vomit off in the distance and a single red room in which Jared Leto stands around, while a floating head shouts at him.  There is a single action scene in the computer world, but it involves a jet ski chase on a river, which is basically the last thing you’d ever want to see in the computer world, especially when it looks like it was shot in front of a bluescreen leftover from the nineties.

The only visually interesting scenes in the entire movie happen when Ares briefly enters the 1980s version of the Tron computer world. It looks exactly as it did in the original movie, and compared to the garbage of everything else in Tron: Ares it’s beautiful and a welcome respite from the movie-by-committee look of everything else.

In 1982, I stood in the back of my Dad’s pickup truck at a drive-in and peered over the top of the cab to look at the screen behind us. My family was there to watch Snow White, but on that second screen across the rural Texas darkness of the drive-in parking lot, was Tron.

I was transfixed. At the age of five, it was the first movie I’d ever seen on the big screen, and it’s what made me fall in love with movies. Eventually, I turned that love of movies into this career, so in a sense, I owe Tron my entire life.

Thank you to everyone involved in that first movie. Stephen Lisberger, the brilliant writer and director. Wendy Carlos, the movie’s genius composer.  Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner, two of the most charismatic and interesting actors of their time, gave it their all despite not always understanding the plot.

And thank you to everyone who made Tron: Legacy, a movie with an imperfect script, brought to life by talent so rare that they managed to overcome it. Their hard work gave Tron a brief second wind set to a once in a life time Daft Punk beat.

But fuck you, Tron: Ares. And double fuck you, Disney. I never want to see another Tron movie again.

Next time you make something this terrible, have some dignity and scrape it off straight to streaming.  Or better yet, delete it entirely. At least then there’d be some hope you can try again.

That won’t happen now. Thanks to Tron: Ares, the world of Tron is now dead. Forever.