The main theme of Tron: Ares is the idea of permanence versus impermanence.  There is wisdom in thinking about these ideas from a Catholic perspective.  The only permanent thing is God, though we all strive after it for ourselves.  I cannot claim to be innocent of such endeavors.  This is why I was disappointed to not see Garrett Hedlund who played Sam Flynn in Tron: Legacy (2010), the son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges).  The latter of these has been the mainstay of the trilogy since its beginning with Tron (1982).  I guess there is some permanency, huh?  I will get more into these thoughts as I continue this review of Tron: Ares.  For now, it is enough to say that there are big questions asked for a film that clocks in at two hours.  Is that enough time to explore the right answers?  You have to read on and decide for yourself.

Actually, there is a bit of reading to do at the start of Tron: Ares.  You can blame this on the decades between it and its predecessors.  Hence, they have to give you a back story, though not in textual form, in order to explain why it is Eve Kim (Greta Lee) that is the president of the Encom corporation instead of its founder Kevin or his son.  Speaking of legacies (no pun intended), the grandson of Ed Dillinger (David Warner, not pictured), the man who tried to usurp Kevin in the first film, has started his own company, Dillinger Systems.  That entrepreneur is Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), and he is trying to compete with Encom.  He is on the verge of a scientific breakthrough, starting with his new advanced, artificial intelligence (AI) bit of code that is technically referred to as the Master Control Program (MCP), but is eventually called Ares (Jared Leto).  The fact that it is named after the Greek god of war is purposeful given his martial nature, and he is unveiled before leading members of the United States military at Dillinger’s headquarters.  The event is intended to demonstrate Julian’s ability to manufacture expendable but indestructible soldiers that he digitally prints from the computer world known as the Grid.  Ares’ debut is impressive, but the brass leave before his nearly half hour limit runs out.  After twenty-nine minutes, Ares disintegrates in the real world and is rebooted in the Grid.  What Julian needs to make Ares stick is something he refers to as the “permanence code.”  Julian suspects that Eve is trying to find the same thing, and he is right, though she has different motivations.  With her friend and colleague Seth Flores (Arturo Castro), they travel to a remote location with a load of Kevin’s old data, convinced that the bytes she needs is somewhere on one of the floppy disks.  Her deceased sister, Tess Kim (Selene Yun), had a similar belief and left Eve clues that lead her to the middle-of-nowhere Alaska.  Following this path is also a way of keeping in contact with Tess, even if it is a memory.  Eve and Seth’s work pays off, and they are successful in producing an orange tree that remains alive, despite being in Alaska, past the half-hour limit.  They are on their way back to Encom headquarters, but Julian suspects that Eve might have done what he had been unable to do.  To prove it, and against the wishes of his mother and Ed’s daughter, Elisabeth Dillinger (Gillian Anderson), he uses Ares to hack into Encom’s mainframe.  Though Ares and his companions do not find the permanence code, he downloads a great deal of information having to do with Eve.  Further, before they can escape, he witnesses Julian sacrifice one of his fellow programs, along with himself, despite being able to get away.  The feeling of being cheap does not sit well with Ares, but before too long, he and his second in command, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), are brought back into the real world to capture Eve.  However, in the motor-cycle chase through the streets, Athena temporarily loses track of Eve, leaving the Encom president alone with Ares.  Ares hesitates in taking Eve, who has just broken and thrown the drive with the code into the water, before he and Athena’s time expires.  Not wanting to miss the chance, Julian has Eve transported onto the grid.  Once there, her memories can be assessed for the code, but it means her death.  Because Ares feels a kinship with her, he rebels and decides to take her to the portal and back to the real world.  In exchange for his help, she agrees to help him be a permanent fixture in her dimension, and they now have thirty minutes to accomplish this task.  It means getting to Encom and going through Kevin’s old files, but Eve now knows where to look.  However, they have to hurry more than expected as Julain has summoned Eve to go after them.  The rushed plan involves placing Ares on the original Grid to seek the code, while Eve and Seth somehow manage to stay alive until Athena expires.  However, she promptly returns on her own.  By this point, Elisabeth has had enough and informs her son that he has been removed from power.  Seeing her as a threat, Athena kills Elisabeth and brushes aside a grief-stricken Julian.  Athena then proceeds to build for herself some large vehicles to move on to Encom and complete her directive.  Meanwhile, on the old Grid, Ares encounters what I can only describe as Kevin’s consciousness, and they have a philosophical discussion that convinces the originator of all this digital mayhem that Ares is worthy of the permanence code.  Ares is then transported back to the real world, but as a man instead of a computer creation.  He then goes to confront Athena, who has managed to capture Eve and is trying to take her to the new Grid.  Ultimately, Ares triumphs, but walks away before the police arrive.  Eve goes on to advance technology for the benefit of mankind with the code.  As for Julian, before the authorities come to arrest him, he zaps himself to the Grid and the film ends.

With Julian getting away at the end of Tron: Ares, I guess this means there will be more films in the franchise.  Does this mean we will see Sam in a future installment?  Who knows?  Film production companies regard such information as state secrets, so we will likely not know until they start filming, if and when that ever happens.  As for this movie, I was somewhat distracted by the fact that he was not in it.  In digging into the matter a little further, director Joachim Rønning claimed in an interview that Hedlund’s presence would have been “fan service.”  If that is the case, why have Bridges?  Is it that those same fans would have looked at the third film without the series stalwart and thought it not legitimate in some way?  In the introduction, I related this discussion to the theme of permanence versus impermanence.  As I said, God is the only permanence we will ever know.  His love will never go away or fail us.  Everything else in life has limits, though luckily for us, we usually have more than a half hour.  Thank God for that, anyway.  At the same time, we are dealing with fantastical worlds and science fiction, stuff only bounded by the human mind.  There is real wisdom in accepting impermanence, but it is illogical to invoke it in a story that is the product of our brains, especially if it does not fit with the plot.  There is a throwaway line near the beginning that claims that Sam left Encom for “mysterious reasons.”  I might be making more of this than is necessary, but does that not deserve further explanation?

What I can give further explanation on in Tron: Ares are the notions of permanence and impermanence.  It begins with Ares, who does not like the idea of being repeatedly sacrificed based on Julian’s whims.  What he comes to understand is that his life is cheap.  I can assure you that this is not how God sees us.  He desires the absolute best for all of us, which, ultimately, is eternity in Heaven.  Everything about Faith is geared towards accomplishing that goal for our benefit.  The opposite is true for the relationship between Ares and Julian.  While it is accurate to say that we are called to serve God, we do so by benefitting others.  Ares services are for the selfish purpose of one man.  What is also interesting about his character is the way he learns about being human by observing Eve.  Specifically, he is touched by viewing footage of her grief in the wake of Tess’ death.  It is emotions that attract him, and what make us human.  God gave us the capacity to feel, which is wonderfully summarized by Eve when she tells Ares that being human is hard.  She adds that it is the things that make life great are also what make it hard.  She is referring to love, of course, and she is arguing that this is what makes it all worth it in every moment.  To be sure, it is difficult when we lose someone we love, but that is only because we loved them at all.  This is God’s greatest gift to us, and it is something we would not know without Him first creating us, and then sacrificing everything for us.  Ares’ sacrifice of digital immortality may not have been on the same scale, but it has a similar inspiration.

At the same time, I doubt Tron: Ares will have the same immortality as the first Tron film.  I enjoyed Tron: Legacy, too, and I do not think Tron: Ares is bad.  It has a few minor plot holes in it, and any other criticism I have is because of my already stated grievances regarding the cast.  Otherwise, it is a fair piece of cinema with some swanky cinematic tricks.