Tron famously fights for the users… but critics aren’t fighting for Tron: Ares. The third installment in Disney’s 40-year-old video-game franchise brings the world of the Grid into our reality, with Jared Leto playing a security computer program who gets in touch with his inner humanity thanks to his time outside of the computer box. Greta Lee plays a programmer-turned-executive in the mold of Kevin Flynn, Tron’s flagship character, portrayed by Jeff Bridges. The Crazy Heart Oscar winner also returns for an extended Ares cameo that specifically hearkens back to the 1982 original.
Tron: Ares represents the latest attempt by the Mouse House to make Tron a viable franchise at the box office after the first film and its follow-up, 2010’s Tron: Legacy, failed to load commercially. But it’s looking like critics are ready to declare game over on the series; Ares currently has a 61 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and holds a 49 on Metacritic.
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There is one flawless victory of a review: RogerEbert.com’s Matt Zoller Seitz gives the film a perfect four-star rating, raving: “Tron: Ares is spectacularly designed, swiftly paced, thoughtfully written and directed within an inch of its neon-hued life.”
“The sum total is a rave of a movie that acts as its own hallucinogen,” Seitz continues. “And that is best experienced on a huge screen with a state-of-the-art sound system. If they’d played it again right after I saw it for the first time, I would have gladly stayed in my seat.”
Other critics were ready to leave the theater, though. Writing in Screen Daily, Tim Grierson says that Ares almost gets by “on style points,” but the “uninspired story” eventually catches up with Leto’s lightcyle. “In the early going, Tron: Ares is such a visual and sonic pleasure that it only slowly becomes apparent that Jesse Wigutow’s screenplay shamelessly recycles musty sci-fi tropes,” Grierson adds. “for all the creativity on display in Tron: Ares, it’s in service of a story with scant signs of life.”
While Rolling Stone’s David Fear acknowledges that Ares has “a few things going for it,” but not enough to fully recommend. “This is still a Tron movie beholden to a mythology that is ridiculously complicated at best and WTF-nonsensical at worst. And if you’re not invested in the overarching narrative of tech-industry intrigue, dystopian digital landscapes, and several terrabytes worth of sci-fi clichés mashed together by now, this will not get you on board.”
Writing in The Wrap, William Bibbiani hits Ares with one of its lowest scores. “The movie … completely sucks,” he writes, going on to slam the latest Tron as a “hack job” that lets down its predecessors. “They were, whatever their other flaws, films with ideas,” he notes of Tron and Tron: Legacy. “Tron: Ares has no ideas. Instead, it has plot. Lots and lots of tedious plot.”
To quote Bridges from another cult favorite: “That’s just like your opinion, man.”
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