In the first “Tron” movie, released just over 43 years ago, one character remarks that while computers can’t think for themselves yet, they will soon. “Won’t that be grand?” he says, with a touch of resigned derision. “The computers and the machines will start thinking, and the people will stop!”
Well, here we are, and there’s a new “Tron,” too. Directed by Joachim Ronning from a screenplay by Jesse Wigutow, “Tron: Ares” is the third in the series — and the first in which no one talks about actual Tron — and it deals in part with artificial intelligence, just like its predecessors. “Tron,” the 1982 original, was the tale of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a hacker genius and game creator who inadvertently gets zapped into the digitized world of a computer, called “the grid,” and must fight his way out, pursued by malicious A.I. called the Master Control Program. It became a cult classic partly for its eye-popping effects and partly because it spawned a whole multimedia empire, including some very popular video games.
So here we are, all these years later, and Encom is still making Flynn’s games. But Sam stepped away a while ago, and a very rapid news montage at the start tells us that Encom now is in the hands of Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who in addition to being chief executive is also hunting for something she calls the permanence code, which she believes Flynn left behind and her late, beloved sister Tess found.
Encom’s archrival is Dillinger Systems, now run by Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the grandson of Ed Dillinger who, as you might recall, was the archrival of the Flynns. Julian seems genetically predisposed to be the baddie here, and so he is, despite his wiser mother (Gillian Anderson) continually telling him to behave. He has figured out a dastardly plan that will make Dillinger Systems fabulously wealthy but also might destroy the planet — especially if he gets his hands on that permanence code snippet.
The plan involves what feels to me like an overly elaborate idea, but this is “Tron,” so stick with me: Inside the Dillinger grid, Julian has created some A.I.-driven programs that guard the company’s security but also could be really good super-soldiers. Like any good megalomaniac tech bro, he’s obsessed with ancient civilizations, so they have names like Caius (Cameron Monaghan), Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) and, yes, Ares (Jared Leto). Once they’re created inside the grid, Julian gives them directives — he types through a command line, but they see more of a Wizard of Oz-style face — and then beams them into the human universe, where they’re constructed with lasers in what I suppose some might call “meatspace.”
There are certain flaws and curiosities in this plan. All the beamed-in entities disintegrate after 29 minutes, for one. And while they’re fully expendable and re-creatable — handy for super-soldiers — there seems to only be about five total of them on the Dillinger grid, which does not an army make. Plus, the whole beaming back and forth from universes feels a little complicated when we have 3-D printers and chips onto which you can place code right here in our universe.
But whatever — bringing logic to a Tron fight is like hauling a set of teaspoons to a shooting range. The story takes off from there, and it’s kind of about artificial intelligence which means, in the end, it becomes about what makes us human. Most movies about A.I. eventually explore this question, which I suppose might be evidence of human narcissism; the answer is usually something like “love” or “mortality” or “fallibility” or “creativity,” all quite nice thoughts to ponder.
The movie retains the techno-industrialist-futurist aesthetic of the series, with music by Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are among the film’s executive producers) and sleek neon-rimmed action set almost entirely at night, but with some genuinely delightful nods to the early 1980s milieu of the original. While Leto continues to register undetectable levels of charisma, Peters manifests an excellently calibrated energy of pure evil mixed with callow petulance. So ranked against other “Tron” feature-length installments, while this one fails to capture the adolescent low-fi charm of the 1982 film, it’s appreciably more enjoyable (and, frankly, comprehensible) than “Legacy.”
Taken together over the past four decades, the “Tron” movies present an interesting case study in how Hollywood — and, by extension, the average moviegoer — imagines A.I. In some respects, that line from the first film gets it best: A proliferation of thinking machines would result in a lot of people relinquishing the exercise of their critical faculties without much of a fight. But the rest of the film wasn’t really about that, and the following two films aren’t interested in it either. Instead, like many a movie about A.I. (1982 was also the year of Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” which set the sci-fi aesthetic template), they conceive of the programs as beings that follow orders, and their main danger as lying in their potential use as killing machines.
No doubt this could be, and already has been, a horrifying application of machine learning. But oddly, we haven’t really seen a cinematic attempt to represent the kind of A.I. most of us are familiar with: large language models like ChatGPT, which don’t think at all, cannot read and do not comprehend. What it knows to do is cater to us. And while people have died after using it, it hasn’t been because A.I. is violent; it’s because it was designed to be servile. In the immediate present, in the most mundane everyday applications, artificial intelligence tools’ greatest danger lies in how it tempts us to skip the act of thinking.
Once in a while entertainment has gotten near hitting on these ideas: Spike Jonze’s movie “Her” (though it failed to understand the ways corporations would fence in and manipulate their A.I. products), or certain episodes of “Black Mirror.” But if what we see at the movies and on TV tells us what to be afraid of, and what to think about the world around us, then we’re never really going to know what to think about living alongside A.I. Most of the time, it still looks like a blue-eyed super-soldier getting beamed out of a digital realm, in some tech bro’s badly lit lair.
Tron: Ares
Rated PG-13 for images of destruction, though it’s all pretty cartoony. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters.