Tron: Ares Damnit bro, we had high hopes for you lols.

So there I was, planning this whole thing with Tron and trying to get it all done before the 10th, thinking that this movie will be a godsend from the Disney overlords after treating the Tron Franchise like a literal piece of garbage.

But oh well.

I mean you see the problem with Ares is not that it is a bad movie, I mean an attempt was made, but shit felt more like a spin off than a sequel to Legacy... And I feel this Franchise has nowhere near reached the level where it would warrant something like that.

I mean yes, Encom exists and plays a major role in the story, but at the same time it feels so different and foreign to the Encom we knew, as well as not having Sam Flynn or Quorra in its leadership does not bode well.

The movie instead has this new CEO named Eve who we have never heard about nor seen before, she is just.... there.

I mean I was so happy that the folks behind Ares were giving Legacy the recognition it deserves by having dual screenings of it in so many places, but like that just appears to have been a marketing thing.

In this one there is next to no reference to the Isos or Quorra or Sam or any of it.

They pretty much just dismiss it in the first 5 minutes by saying Sam left "for personal reasons" lol.

What a way to treat your Legacy.

But enough of that what is going on here?

So I mean we all saw this shot from the Trailers right? The one where Ares is brought into the real world and shown off to the investors by Julian dillinger son of Edward Dillinger, who was the Father of Edward Dillinger and also the guy who screwed over Flynn in the very first movie.

If you understandably were flabbergasted by whatever that whole sentence was then allow me to decode that shit for you.

You see, in the original 1982 Tron movie the main Character was Kevin Flynn played by an uncomfortably young Iron Monger, and he had created the games of Tron and Space Paranoids and then those games were stolen by a colleague called Edward Dillinger who pitched them to the company and used it to launch his own Career, meanwhile Kevin was fired.

By the end of course Flynn gets evidence of the theft after entering and exiting the Grid for the first time and then in the Future-past of 2010 he is locked up in the Grid once again after a series of events explored in the Tie in game of Tron: Evolution, and here we have the son of the original Ed Dillinger, Ed Dillinger junior.

But no he is gone and now we have ol'Julie boy.

And he has figured out a way for programs to do exactly what Clu wanted to do with Flynn's disk, i.e. escape the Grid, and I mean yes, that did seem to be the logical next step, for the Grid to come to us, but like at the same time.... I feel like this should be bigger?

I mean like an invasion bigger, not just some ploy by a rival company to grow their stocks.

The programs should have some awareness of the past events, these are just fresh ones, and Ares is Master Control here.... of a very small area...

like can see it from a singe balcony small.

And what do these programs do here exactly? When they are not being summoned by their Overlords?

I mean an initial sequence implies that they are just Training against other programs, being destroyed and recreated, but... no apparently...

Ares is summoned by Julian to show to his investors but he "forgets" to mention that these programs can only stay here for... about 25 minutes...

Oh no wait, 29 minutes.

But anyways the entire movie then becomes about finding this elusive permanence code which apparently makes it so that programs can stay in the real world without a time-limit.

This is something that The CEO of Encom, Eve has found.

She uses it to make an orange tree, and Julian sends Ares and Athena after her to get it.

And once that doesn't work cause she throws the Hard-drive in the water, they use a digitizer to transfer Eve to the Grid.

Once there, they can extract the code from her mind, but this will cause De-resolution, which is Death in the world of Tron, Julian obviously doesn't care having previously destroyed a Cameron Monagham Cameo earlier for daring to loose a foot.

And this destruction happens during an attempted Hack into the Encom system, revealing that there are different Grid Islands to represent different systems, this had the effect of Giving Jared Leto a little bit of humanity...

No wait, Ares a little bit of Humanity... nothing can give Jared Leto Humanity...

And Ares just goes into the files of Eve and learn everything about her.

Okay...

So upon learning of the whole de resolution thing and because of the whole earlier destroyed program Ares decides to go against Julian and makes a deal with Eve to get the Permanence code from whence she got it earlier.

Julian doesn't respond well to this and Makes Athena the new Master control giving her the directive to find eve and Ares by any means necessary.

The chase ensues and Ares and Eve bond over this ride as Ares slowly begins to realize what it i to feel things, like the rain, they decide to send him into the old 80s system to find the permanence code, giving us the obligatory but still quite nice nostalgia to the 80s sequence.

And it is here that Ares goes in search of the permanence code while Athena attacks Eve and her team having a little longer before she is De-Rezzed as she was brought into this world a little after Ares.

Ares initially had tried to sacrifice himself and go after Athena but... no luck...

Once again the power of feeling comes to save everyone as right before Athena is about to send Eve to the grid the sprinklers start and Athena feels the water on her face, for the first time understanding what it felt like for Ares...

And then she is De-Rezzed and remade in the system.

Hyper focused on her goal she rematerializes in the real world and brings a Recognizer.

And she kills Julian's mom.... so much for all that eh Jules?

Meanwhile Ares meets a Navi Bit, and that leads him to... Flynn?

Well it turns out his presence is just because of Ares's presence, and like an old wise master he tests whether Ares is worthy of the Permanence he so desires, and gives it to him...

Now question... I thought Programs could enter this world with Flynn's Disk, like wasn't that the plot of Legacy?

So does the Disk have the Permanence code?

What?

You see one of the major problems is that this movie straight up just contradicts lore sometimes, like once they call Eve being transported to the Grid Impossible??? Like what?

Are they not aware of what happened to Kevin and Sam? Who knows... maybe Sam didn't mention it, you would think he did given how focused on the Grid Encom is right now.

But anyways enough of that, Ares comes to save the day

All the while Eves team is working in the background to dismantle the dillinger system so that this time when Athena dies, she can't come back.

The movie actually ends on a sombre note, as Ares and Athena both show humanity as Athena lies dying and Ares realizes that he really has no purpose right now.

Through out the movie Eve and Ares have this will they wont they romantic tension and it's kinda cute and they resolve it by showing how some time later Encom is using the permanence code to build more for everyone and Ares writes to Eve whom he had previously convinced not to quite Encom after being done with her sisters work(she died of Cancer) about how he is visiting the world on incognito cause he realizes the world isn't ready to meet him, but he will surely meet the world.

And there is a tease that maybe Quorra is still around, and that's that.

I want to mention here about how it is actually quite poignant that Ares writes and doesn't use tech to communicate because that goes to show that while we move further from nature, the programs we create want to get closer to it.

Just like Quorra and the Sunrise.

And overall I can see there was a sincere attempt but once again the movie doesn't exactly emphasize its themes and like it seems to be running purely on its insane visuals and soundtrack, which they are quite sweet, I just hope that they still keep trying with Tron, anything for Uprising Season 2.

And that Legacy sequel, we need that Sam and Quorra ship right guys?

And as for this movie, like I said, we did get more awesome lightcycle battles/chases alongside disk battles and some new light weapons and Nine inch Nails made the soundtrack, so there is obviously some good in it, just given the box office, I don't think the general audience agrees.