The world of Tron is not exactly Shakespearean in nature, but Disney’s handling of its enigmatic science fiction franchise over the past forty years has been nothing shy of a tragedy. The Grid is such a delectable palette for creative storytelling, something that no filmmaker who’s touched the material has ever quite figured out. The same pattern emerges through the decades. Tron hits theaters, impresses with its visuals, bores with its plot, and makes just enough money that someone considers bringing it out of hibernation every few decades.

Tron: Ares tries to set itself apart from its predecessors, at least on the surface, with its preoccupation with the real world rather than The Grid. Fifteen years have passed since the events of Tron: Legacy. ENCOM is in a technology race with Dillinger Systems, founded by former ENCOM executive and original Tron tertiary villain Ed Dillinger. Dillinger Systems is now run by Ed’s grandson Julian (Evan Peters), who courts the military with his new Master Control Program (MCP), Ares (Jared Leto).

While Dillinger Systems and ENCOM are both capable of bringing their digital constructs into reality, essentially a reverse of the technology that sends humans to The Grid, neither can do so for longer than 29 minutes. New ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee) and her assistant Seth (Arturo Castro) travel to a remote Alaskan bunker once used by Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) in search of the “permanence code” that would remove the 29-minute limitation.

Julian sends Ares and his second-in-command, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), to capture hacked ENCOM and capture Eve, in search of the permanence code. Along the way, Ares starts to develop a conscience, realizing that Dillinger Systems is the bad kind of capitalism, while ENCOM is the more benevolent corporation. Ares and Eve team up, escape the Dillinger version of the Grid, and try to learn a bit about humanity as they run around trying to evade Athena.

Ares spent about fifteen years in development, much of it as a direct sequel to Legacy, before being redeveloped around Leto’s character. The Legacy screenwriters, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, received a story credit for Ares. The finished product puts quite a bit of distance between itself and Legacy, while clinging hard to the original 1982 Tron.

Director Joachim Rønning is put in the untenable position of having to craft his own narrative that never really lets you forget it relies on Tron’s broader lore. Casual fans may not remember Dillinger much, but the constant references to the Flynn family do no favors to Ares’ bloated cast of cardboard human characters. Peters does a serviceable job as a generic evil billionaire, a bargain bin Lex Luthor.

Lee exists in this weird space where Eve is the lead human character, and basically the de facto protagonist. Ares is clearly meant to be Leto’s vehicle. Rønning provides some basic slivers of plot to try to endear his audience to Eve, but Lee is never really afforded a chance to make the character her own. It’s as if Disney realized that Legacy managed to stand upright without a particularly memorable lead performance from Garrett Hedlund as Sam Flynn, and decided that Eve similarly didn’t have to do much either.

Leto fully immerses himself in the role of a computer program desperate to be a real boy. He is a very believable soulless construct. He even has a few slivers of charm here and there, but the film suffers from an uneven point of view. This film is less Eve’s or Ares’ than a paint-by-numbers action flick capable of going through the motions, but never really making them feel alive.

Gillian Anderson is largely wasted in a supporting role as Julian’s mother Elisabeth. The rest of the supporting cast put forth an eager effort, but the film suffers from way too many characters. Turner-Smith is perhaps the one actor who seems to know this is supposed to be a Tron movie. Athena is a lot of fun.

Both Tron and Tron: Legacy suffered from uneven storytelling, requiring state-of-the-art visuals and stellar scores to carry their narratives. Rønning delivers the visuals. Ares is a beautiful sight to behold on the big screen. Nine Inch Nails put forth a superb musical effort that would almost justify Ares’ existence as an extended music video, paying homage to the ground trodden by Wendy Carlos and Daft Punk while carving out their own niche. The music is pretty much the only original thing Ares has going for it.

The film’s original sin is its preoccupation with the real world. People don’t wait decades to watch programs fight in cities. Tron’s real treasure is The Grid. Ares barely cares about The Grid.

If the screenwriters didn’t know how to tell a good story in The Grid, they’d hardly be the first. This is not a franchise known for its meaty plots. Ares had fifteen years to fix the narrative shortcomings of Legacy, a film that in spite of that gaping hole, and Hedlund’s forgettable lead performance, had plenty of things going for it. It’s frankly pathetic that this is what they came up with.

The result is indistinguishable from the AI it nominally critiques, empty slop poured into its audience’s feed trough. Rarely does a major blockbuster rely so heavily on its composers to add any semblance of creative expression to such a lifeless corpse. There are way too many scenes that drag for an action film that clocks in at just under two hours.

Even Bridges feels fairly checked out amidst the film’s finest sequence, well-executed nostalgia bait for diehards of the original Tron. There’s much more of The Dude in his performance than Flynn, which might be the right attitude to bring to this disaster. The third act is far too pleased to give its audience slivers of what would have been a far more interesting movie.

Tron has never been prestige art. Tron and Tron: Legacy are both deeply flawed narratives that succeeded due to the ample heart that went into both productions. Those films brought something new to the table. They had something to say.

Ares is often very pretty. The music is wonderful. Yet again, this franchise was let down by its screenwriters. It’s taken forty years to make three Tron movies. Maybe in another forty years, we’ll get one with a decent plot.

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