general thoughts about Ares:

(not overwhelmingly strong either way)

I appreciate the amount of work that was put into details and references and easter eggs. This is a thing Tron’s always been good at and I do like it. Noticed stuff like the Mead-Moebius bus and the Shaddix truck. Nice. Also noticed a lot of the little nods to dialogue in the original.

Cool to know the scene with people in ‘82 cosplay was a Space Paranoids con. Makes me wonder if the in-universe Space Paranoids game was where Flynn ended up using some of those inspirations.

Interesting how the visual of the Sark/Master Control dynamic is echoed in how Julian communicates with his program (who in this version is the Master Control program, so it’s a strange not-quite-reversal).

(Wonder what exactly is behind his Sark transformation at the end. Is there another MCP at work? Maybe a trace of the original one? I did notice how there’s a voice faintly saying “Sark” as he picks up the disc– sounding exactly like the MCP calling Sark’s name right before “All my power is now yours.”)

I liked some of the little programming details. And how they fit into some of the character stuff. For example I noticed how Julian asserts that he’s going to fix whatever “PEBCAK error” is causing Ares to have feelings. Found this amusing because considering what a PEBCAK error is, he’s admitting the feelings come ultimately from him. Ha.

…I was sad that there were practically none of the characters I’d gotten to know. And the new characters didn’t grab me the way the 1982 characters did. But then, me getting obsessed with a character, or a movie, is extremely rare. It has happened very intensely a few times in my life, but it’s not usually how my mind works. So I wasn’t really expecting more.

I think Jared Leto actually did a good job portraying his character, and looked quite attractive while doing so, but my ability to appreciate this was limited by his horrible reputation for bad behavior in real life. I can separate art from artist to a degree, but in this case my artistic and aesthetic appreciation was not able to get very far past my other thoughts about the actor.

The movie definitely steered away from continuing any of the storylines started by previous installments. And that was frustrating. I don’t like it, but that is how the Tron franchise has always been.

However, I don’t think it “retconned” or “undid” anything.

It treated Ares as the public’s first experience with sentient programs because Sam never went public about Quorra or any of the rest of what he experienced. It also never really says where the permanence code came from, or what else Flynn might have done with it.

But it feels like the logical conclusion is that this was the “Miracle of the Isos.” It seems to me that the implied explanation is that the ISOs had code in them that let them last as long as a User in the User world. And Flynn was able to create the permanence code from that, and use it potentially for other programs and digital matter.

Interesting how this means that Ares doesn’t invalidate old headcanons about Sam having brought other programs, like Tronzler, into the User world. It would just mean Sam found the permanence code in his dad’s files and learned how to use it. Or that Flynn’s programs in the Legacy Grid already had it installed.

And Sam didn’t make it public knowledge, for whatever reason.

Could be somehow related to why he stepped down from being CEO. Lots of possible interpretations.

For example: imagine if you were in charge of a tech company where you had suddenly learned that all the software was alive. And you had no idea how to begin restructuring a tech company to treat living, sentient software in any sort of humane way. And no one else there even knows about this, or would easily believe it if told. Convincing them, without just being called crazy and unfit for the position, would be the first step you’d have to get past. And they already think you’re pretty crazy.

maybe you realize this is just… not a feasible job for your little 27-year-old nepo baby self who’s spent your life so far on big flashy stunts that never fixed anything systemic. You’re a good guy, you honestly want to fix this– but you have no idea.

However. You do have the ability to rezz out some of your most beloved programs, make them “permanent,” and go take them someplace safe away from the public eye.

And maybe that’s all you can do. And maybe you resign yourself to that, and do it within a couple years of starting all this– because you just simply cannot handle the rest of it.

So, like… fandom isn’t ruined. there are still headcanony ways to keep doing whatever you want with the source material, without contradicting anything new that Ares added. It pretty much stayed out of the way of headcanoning.

But, in all, I found the movie underwhelming.

Which is not so much an indictment of the movie– it clearly worked for a lot of people– but more a thing about me and how I react to movies in general.

I think it hammered home the fact that my getting into the 1982 movie was an extremely rare fluke in my life.

Nearly all the things I do for fun involve making stuff. Passive entertainment tends to be a background for my crafts if anything. I am almost never a person who is deeply into movies, let alone Disney movies. I rarely start movies or shows of any kind unless someone talks me into it. Getting me to love a movie, no matter how good, is a very hard sell.

I found Ares entertaining in the same mild way I found Legacy and Uprising entertaining. I didn’t feel that it did anything really remarkable with the plot, or introduced any ideas that haven’t already been done more interestingly many times elsewhere in fiction.

But this is typical of Disney movies. They are safe and formulaic. Anything considered revolutionary in a Disney movie is almost certainly only revolutionary for a Disney movie.

Again here, the 1982 Tron movie felt to me like a rare exception.

Not just for the new computer animation technology, but for the portrayal of character and relationship storylines that felt honestly more fresh than anything I’d watched in forever. The plot and pacing and dialogue was weird, yes, but weird in a weird way– an actually different way that didn’t feel like other movies. It was as weird and messy and stupid and inconsistent as real life is sometimes. The same “flaws” that made it feel unrealistic to people whose expectations are shaped by movies, made it seem extra believable to me on several levels.

But. I also realize that the fact I fell in love with the original 1982 movie specifically was not just because of specific ways it was different from other movies. it was also because I myself was in a very rare receptive phase of my life.

My brain for some reason was uniquely ready to get obsessed with something. and I happened to find a fanfic that was exactly what my brain was craving for whatever weird reason. and since it was a fanfic of that movie, it pulled me in.

I am honestly not sure I could have gotten to this level of love for Tron 1982 by any other path. It was a rare fluke and unlikely to happen any other time, any other way.

So I was not expecting my response to Ares to be anything like that. And so I wasn’t really let down much.