[COLUMN] The Eerie Emptiness of TRON: Ares | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains a full discussion of the plot of TRON: Ares. There aren’t too many spoilers in here, although several key character and story beats are discussed. If you want a quick review: it’s very bad. It’s a movie where nothing happens, very loudly and very insistently. 

There is a strange emptiness to TRON: Ares.

This isn’t a metaphorical observation. It is not a critique of the movie’s storytelling choices or its emotional arcs, although it certainly could be applied in that way. It is a very literal comment on the film’s texture, its look and feel. TRON: Ares presents the viewer with an eerily and uncannily empty world, one seemingly populated by about a dozen characters burdened with names and maybe a dozen more background performers given the occasional line of exposition.

TRON: Ares begins with the eponymous character, computer program Ares (Jared Leto), waking up on a slab in an empty room. The far wall is a glass window, and through it he can see a digital world in the distance. Ares is locked in that room, where his only company is a handful of other programs – the only noteworthy one being his lieutenant Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith). He receives his commands from the disembodied head of his creator, tech CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters).

There is clearly meant to be some sense of tragedy in this set up, with Ares presented as a caged bird. Over the course of Ares, the program seeks to break free and to escape the confines of his digital world. He wants to be seen as a person. He wants to become. It’s a fairly straightforward character arc, and it builds organically from that opening scene. The only problem in the way that the film develops this arc is that the entirety of TRON: Ares feels like an extension of that empty room.

On paper, TRON: Ares has an epic scale. Two tech companies go to war with one another, as their digital creations escape virtual reality to wreak havoc upon the outside world. There are several massive set pieces that finds these characters laying siege to the vast urban sprawl – police chases involving light cycles, aerial combat with a gigantic craft from Space Paranoiacs, a clear Space Invaders rip-off, and even a tank tearing through the facility. It’s a big movie, reportedly costing $180m.

However, in reality, the film feels strangely small. Throughout Ares, there is an odd sense that the film could never line-up the shooting schedules tightly enough to get more than three named characters in the same physical space at any given moment. The meat of the film takes place over at least one full day, but it seems like the entirety of Dillinger’s tech conglomerate consists of Julian himself and his mother, Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson). No assistants, no lawyers, no coders.

The film finds its primary cast bouncing around in tight configurations, never bringing them together in groups larger than three: Julian, Elisabeth, Ares; Julian, Elisabeth, Athena; Ares, Athena, and Encom CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee); Ares, Eve and Eve’s personal assistant Seth Flores (Arturo Castro); Eve, Seth and Encom’s CTO Ajay Singh (Hasan Minhaj). It’s a very strange pattern once one starts to notice it. At one point, Ares has to leave a scene before Athena can attack Eve and Seth.

This gets a bigger emptiness within the film. For all the scale and spectacle of Ares, the world itself seems empty. As Athena lays siege to the city at the climax, there are police cars and fighter jets, but they don’t seem to contain people. There are no quick cut aways to the officers driving these cars or the pilots flying these planes. As office buildings are demolished, there are no reaction shots from workers in adjoining structures or pedestrians on the ground.

For all that Ares is about these programs breaking free of their digital shackles and escaping into the real world, that real world seems like a hollow simulacra. The film occasionally acknowledges the idea that people exist outside of the named primary cast, but only fleetingly. Elisabeth monologues about how “the Board” will strip Julian of his title for deploying Ares and Athena as would-be kidnappers to hunt down Eve, but seemingly a whole business day passes without event.

News coverage of these strange visitors plays out on screens and monitors, where it could easily be added and tweaked in post-production, but it’s just empty exposition. There is no sense of existential awe or wonder. What does this mean? Who are these people? Why do they look like that? Is the real world being colonized from cyberspace? The events of Ares should represent a massive shift in human consciousness, altering mankind’s relationship to the universe. Instead, they’re just noise.

Even Eve seems weirdly nonplussed when Julian sends two computer-generated soldiers to track her down and kidnap her so he can extract “the permanence code” from her. Of course, Eve knows that entities from the virtual world can enter reality, but it should feel like an escalation of stakes that her business rival has suddenly decided to tear up a major metropolitan area to get to her. Instead, Eve takes this all in her stride. This is good for Eve, but it doesn’t make for compelling viewing.

An obvious point of comparison for this motorcycle chase is Bruce Wayne’s (Christian Bale) return in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, as the Caped Crusader chases Bane (Tom Hardy) and his soldiers through Gotham after spending eight years in hiding. Nolan works hard to make this sequence feel like an epoch-defining moment for the city, something that is a big deal in the context of Gotham history.

Nolan does this by expanding the scope beyond Bruce and Bane. He focuses on the reactions of observers. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) watches with pride from his hospital bed. Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) allows herself a moment of distraction from the safe she is cracking, smirking wryly, “What do you know?” John Daggett (Ben Mendelsohn) watches the news from his penthouse. An older cop (Brent Briscoe) advises his partner (Will Estes), “Oh boy, you are in for a show tonight, son.”

To sell the enormity and import of this moment: The Dark Knight Rises cuts across huge swaths of Gotham society: rich and poor, named and anonymous, those witnessing the chase firsthand and those watching through screens. It creates real scale. Of course, Nolan is obviously one of the best filmmakers working in blockbuster cinema, while Ares is directed by Joachim Rønning, the guy responsible for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.

To be fair, this may be a conscious choice on the part of the studio and the filmmaker. Much has been written about the ubiquity of urban devastation in contemporary blockbusters and its invocation of 9/11. Certainly, Ares has strong shades of that, with aircraft smashing into skyscrapers as wreckage pours down over a major urban center. The general emptiness of the city may be an attempt to avoid dealing with the uncomfortable implications of watching that level of destruction and chaos.

Still, there’s a strange numbness to Ares. Ares claims to be looking for “permanence”, but the film has no grasp of the concept. A major American city becomes the site of a strange intrusion by visitors using technology beyond human reckoning. Rays of red light cut through cop cars, using the same technology that Julian demonstrated to the American military only hours earlier, but nobody shows up at Julian’s headquarters for a whole day, until it’s time for the movie to come to an end.

For all that Ares longs to escape his glass cage, the film never manages to create the impression of a populated world outside of it. When Julian sends Ares and Athena to infiltrate the Encom servers, there is no sign of life there outside of an army of security programs. There’s no sense of a vibrant life like the one that Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) proposed back in TRON: Legacy, a world of “ships”, “motorcycles” and “circuits like freeways.”

Legacy makes an interesting point of contrast to Ares. The world of Legacy was developed and built out. Both the digital and the real world were populated with characters who were perhaps ancillary to the plot, but who helped to create a sense of a larger context for what was happening. In the first fifteen minutes of Legacy, the audience meets a bunch of staff at Encom who never return, but who help lay out the stakes: chairman Richard Mackey (Jeffrey Nordling), programmer Edward Dillinger (Cillian Murphy) and even security guard Ernie (Dan Joffre) who chases Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund).

Those characters are not, strictly speaking, essential to the film’s narrative. They are unlikely to be named in any plot summary, but they serve to communicate a lot about the world. They explain what Encom is, how it works, and why Sam wants no part of the world that his father Kevin built. Also, in their various reactions to Sam’s antics, they tell the audience something about Sam: Richard’s frustration, Edward’s indifference, Ernie’s confusion. They serve a purpose.

This continues into the digital world of Legacy. There’s the dictator CLU (Bridges), his silent assassin Rinzler (Bruce Boxleitner) and his toady Jarvis (James Frain). There’s also the treacherous nightclub owner Castor (Michael Sheen). More than that, there is a broader sense of this as a world populated with distinct characters, from the anonymous program Sam aligns with the arena (Darren Dolynski) to the seductive Gem (Beau Garrett). Even the streets of the virtual world bustle with life.

In contrast, the real world of Ares feels like a museum. Over the course of the film, there are two painstakingly detailed recreations of outside locations placed within the walls of Encom Tower. Kevin Flynn’s home office is modelled in loving detail on the executive floor, while Eve later builds a shrine to her sister Tess’ (Selene Yun) remote outpost on the roof. None of these are actual spaces where people have lived, just immaculate copies of them. They look convincing, but there is no life to them.

Ares hinges on the notion of Ares developing empathy. A key plot beat finds Ares deciding to disobey Julian and trust Eve to help him escape his virtual prison. Where does this empathy come from? The film explains this academically through exposition – Ares has been sifting through data and developed some affinity for humanity (and Eve) in the abstract – but it’s hard to buy this evolution emotionally, given Ares has only interacted with about three people to this point.

Over the course of the film, the closest that Ares comes to having an emotional interaction with a person who is not Eve comes during that chase through the city, when he stops just short of hitting a car carrying a baby. Ares scans the baby’s face through the car door. However, there is no direct interaction. The baby never appears again. Somehow, that anonymous baby that appears for three seconds of screentime is maybe the eighth-best developed human character in TRON: Ares.

The result of all of this is that it is very hard to care about anything that happens in Ares, because it feels like it is unfolding in a world of cardboard populated by cutouts. For a film about these computer programs breaking out into reality, the “real” world of TRON: Ares ultimately feels profoundly unreal.