Tammy, Tyler, and I went to Tron: Ares tonight at Emagine Willow Creek. I’d been wanting to see this since the day it came out.

I saw the original Tron when I was 10 years old living in Jamestown, ND. As a kid that loved computers and spent hours writing mangled BASIC programs the movie was amazing. Some friends and I liked it so much that we wanted to be in the movie. We got frisbees and painted them to look like Tron discs and attempted our own version of disc wars at night. Note, it hurts to get his with a frisbee in the head. 😬 I also put a ton of quarters into the TRON arcade game back in the day. Since then I’ve seen all the Tron movies and shows including Tron: Legacy, Tron: Uprising (series), and now Tron: Ares.

In short, I’m going to like this movie if for no other reason than I enjoy seeing the Tron “world” continue to exist and grow. The production and SFX for Tron: Ares were incredible and in general I find their nods to tech to always be fun. It made me chuckle that while Tron envisions a world where a program can materialize in the real world, you would still have people running killall on something that is for sure a Unix shell. I thought Ares did a good job of also illustrating how simple tasks given to an AI with “by any means” could go terribly wrong. I also liked that Ares himself goes through a process of determining right and wrong and starts to express feelings.

The high point for me was Ares going back to the original Tron grid and meeting Flynn. This was a high-point of nostalgia and I could have stayed in that scene for a while longer.

With that said, and I did like it, some things I didn’t love:

  • The storyline took a hard pivot in my view to get to a good v. evil plot point. We now clearly have Encom framed as the Rebel Alliance and Dillinger Systems as the Empire. I’m straining the metaphor but it feels like Ares specifically wanted to get those archetypes setup for future releases. I could gripe a bit about the overt multi-channel product planning being pushed into the story line but all the Star Wars fans could just say “yeah, been there, done that”
  • There was no revisit to the ISO’s from Tron: Legacy, short of Quorra’s picture being referenced in the very last scene.
  • The premise of things in the “grid” (aka cloud?) coming into the real world is a bit like time travel. It opens up all sorts of “yeah, but what about” story line issues.

Overall a good movie either way. I’m completely and positively sure they are already working on another Tron movie, and I’ll be there for it. 🤓