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.
The 2010 sequel, “Tron: Legacy,” is entirely forgettable (I, in fact, forgot that I’d seen it till halfway through my recent rewatch), and “Tron: Ares” ignores most of it, which means you can, too. The only pertinent detail is that Sam Flynn, son of Kevin, went in search of his missing father in the grid and eventually located him there, living like a disaffected Zen master on the edge of the universe; Sam re-emerged to take over his father’s company, Encom.
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.
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