I watched this movie a couple of days after it dropped on Disney+. I’m a fan. Loved the first and second films. Tron Ares “bombed” at the box office. And it really did. Google’s AI says it did only $142M globally and a pitiful $73M domestically. Surprising, really, or maybe not.
The film got a lot of hate because of Jared Leto. What I read online was that he was very excited to be a part of the Tronverse, and he’s a decent and popular actor, so what happened? IMHO, it wasn’t his fault.
In online advertising, I felt the story was a bit misrepresented. I got the impression that we were going to see an actual war with programs from the digital realm invading the “real world” on a large scale. What we got was a total of four programs entering the real world on a 29-minute mission to acquire the “permanence code” from a human. That was still a fairly exciting premise, but viewers knew none of that going in, and I didn’t love it.
I felt also that the programs were just too human in terms of their behavior. As the new MCP, I thought Ares would be a bit more sanitized. Clean-shaven with a military-style haircut. Leto’s long-haired, bearded portrayal seemed very off to me. I wonder whose decision it was to have Ares look that way? I’m sure the scriptwriters at Disney thought that having Ares rebel and have compassion for a human was a novel idea, but I think the story would have been more entertaining if he had stuck to his programming.
To be sure, the visuals of this film and the NIN score were amazing. I didn’t hate the film, I just felt it could have been better. In Tron Legacy, Clu intended to invade the real world and that was kind of what I was expecting here.
I did enjoy the little nod to David Warner (Sark, from the original film) in the post credits scene where the Dillinger character (Evan Peters) escapes into his own digital grid and is painfully transformed into Sark. Maybe that is the teaser for the movie I was expecting to begin with. Thanks for reading.
Wordsmithy 