A Rantview of Tron:Ares

Tron:Ares is a stupid fucking movie. It is also, I think, an important movie. Not for any real artistic reason. It hardly measures up to the first two, despite being basically the same thing: aesthetically influential, beautiful to look at, a nice little adventure, but devoid of any real thesis. It is important as a measure of the times, as a tiny little blip of symptoms and ideologies afflicting the modern world. It's a story about a good CEO who wants to make the world better fighting against a bad one who wants to sell his scary stuff to the military. It's about how the machine that's being used for such evil things is a person, actually, and maybe if you give it all of your personal information it will come to see you as a person too and save you. Maybe one day ChatGPT will be a real boy. Maybe the real boy could be your friend.

This movie came out against a backdrop of Palantir, of OpenAI, of a thousand and one stupid little bullshit companies throwing money back and forth and trying desperately to get picked up by the United States government or sold to a random conglomerate before time runs out. It came out while Disney was rapidly attempting to use generative AI itself (though it didn't manage to in this particular movie), hoping that it could be used to replace the human artists that it would otherwise rely on. Tron:Legacy, by comparison, came out against the background of the Big Data rush, but didn't deign to really comment on it at all, and Tron was, at best, making light commentary on the dangers of the new world presented by large scale business computing. Ares, though, wants to say something. Maybe. It *could* say something, if it were allowed, and very nearly manages to, but it is of course gagged by the corporate entity paying for its extensive CGI. Isn't it so scary that there are huge corporations out there that are intentionally deceiving their shareholders in order to secure funding for projects designed with the explicit purpose of killing people en masse? Isn't it scary that the world is run in no small part by short-sighted, profit-seeking lunatics, so-called rationalists who think that knowing how to type a few sudo commands and wearing an expensive hoodie put them above the sea of rabble who exist to fund new enterprises with their tax dollars?

No, of course, because a few CEOs are nice ladies who want to help you, and maybe even cure cancer, or grow orange trees in the snow. There's a strain of now rarely seen techno-optimism in the story. The idea that maybe we could use our burgeoning ability to blend the physical and the digital for good. That somehow, some way, someone will choose to be a good person, be an effective altruist, embrace longtermism, and place the needs of humanity squarely above their profits. We of course know better, in the real world, and know that all those cute little humanist philosophies that tech CEOs supposedly believe in exist only to be twisted in the name of profit. We have to do this because the future of humanity relies on it, of course. Never mind the worsening storms or the floods, or the droughts, or the polar vortexes, or anything else that's been happening. Never mind that the snow never sticks anymore. It doesn't matter if the people of today are suffering, because the people of the future will surely benefit from all this in the future that will supposedly exist after everything is fried to a crisp by the forces of capital. In Tron:Ares there are more fireflies in the opening few minutes than I've seen anywhere in years.

They really do try to make the movie endearing. The tech is *cool*. It's modernized for the era. Things are made of plastic, look plastic, feel plastic. The digital constructs break themselves free of a filament framework reminiscent of 3D printers. Legacy, by comparison, seemed to be made mostly of metal, and Tron before it of straight up polygons. Gliders, quarterstaffs, and massive tanks join the Tron machine family. The fights are great, and the scene they put all the money into (where the NIN song with vocals actually plays) looks amazing. Tron has always been primarily about aesthetics over any real substance, and the same holds true here. In between the horrible dialogue (why is Seth even in the movie?) and the odd, Netflix original style opening minutes of the movie, there are little pieces that could almost be good. The movie goes down like plain grits with just the smallest bit of salt here and there. There are tons of cute details. Eve uses a split mechanical keyboard. The cybersecurity guys dress in a cool, cutesy way reminiscent of Hackers. There are callbacks to the awesome motorcycle scene in the front bit of Legacy that gave me some of my first ever gender envy. Everywhere you look there are references. Old arcade machines, old computers, Rubik's cubes, the Akira slide, Depeche Mode. You guys remember the 80s? The 80s were the best, weren't they?

It's obsessed with the 80s. Who wouldn't be? That's when the first one came out. People were real people, back then, when they spent less time online. Before all this dehumanizing number stuff that keeps us far apart. "How many people born in this century have even heard of Mozart?" All of them, doofus. Nowadays he's just competing with Prokofiev and Beethoven for Tiktok edit and dark academia Youtube playlist real estate. You have to live your real life, the only one you've got, and spend it offline. Human life is valuable because its impermanent, unlike the (assumed, though not practically) eternal life of a bunch of electrons on a server somewhere. This, of course, sits oddly with the notion that interaction with all this digital corpotrash will make your life better. It's so cool how Ares tells Eve all the stuff he knows about her (through spying) and jumps straight to a random, jarring emotional scene while speeding through traffic and listening to Just Can't Get Enough. Isn't it so 80s to talk about someone's dead sister (that you've never met!) while weaving through traffic in a car mentioned by full model name a few minutes earlier? You should live a good, earnest life making connections with other people that you value every day, while also being completely fine with having your data harvested at every opportunity by a megacorporation so they can somehow make you happy. Real emotional connection with a fake man who will soothe your traumas and encourage you when you feel like giving up. Now that's living retrofuturistically.

Every criticism this movie makes falls flat because of who made it and how little they were willing to risk making a real statement. Dillinger is an annoying, noisy, selfish techbro who leaves his mother to die and goes to the grid alone instead of simply digitizing her. But Eve is nice, isn't she? A good techbro can beat up a bad one, easy. AI used for military purposes is a danger to us all because it cannot identify enemies or obey orders while unable to understand context. But the one that wears the face of an abusive actor no one likes? That one really feels! It's your friend. It gets there basically instantly just from seeing the protagonist talk! Athena, despite being the objectively cooler character of the two of them, despite being the character with some real internal and moral conflict (and the only good line in the movie), gets no help in becoming a Real Boy. She's representative of the Bad Usecase, which will ultimately die before the dawn of the new age. She's made mortal through server disconnection and destroyed by mere time. She's mourned, but ultimately abandoned for being behind the times, just like Dillinger's mother. Like father, like son, huh?

Every emotional beat is rushed or muted. Ares and Eve are friends just like that. Seth is here to make it annoying. There are two other people who exist just to do plot contrivances. Ares and Eve commiserate over her dead sister. Dillinger's mom dies. We have no time to make you care about the characters, we have to get to the fight scenes! The pleasant soundtrack provides most of the emotional quality you do get. It's not as "NIN" as I'd like, though the Daft Punk soundtrack sounded nothing like the rest of their discography, either, much to middle school me's disappointment. It's good enough for a relisten while I write this, at least.

It's a movie where you can see how it could've been good. The small details are good, the spots that the corporate overseers didn't care about enough to ruin. It feels like a movie that died by committee. There were bits of love, attempts at *something*. But, in a move we've come to expect from Disney, they opted to release the blandest, most inoffensive version of a "movie" they could possibly make.

It's a failed attempt to propagandize the public into accepting the "AI future" they want you to let them build at your expense. They don't understand what they're buying, and they're upset that you won't buy it too. They live in a separate world from you and me. Look at the possibilities, they say. Look at the friend you could make, the things we could build, the solution to all the world's problems. AI is the future, but it's fragile and prone to corruption. Not by us, of course, we're trying to help you. We just have to figure out how to keep it from collapsing so quickly. We have to make it permanent. Please, please let us.