Tron: Ares Is About To Deliver On A Strange Promise
Is this what we actually wanted?
When Tron hit theaters in 1982, the idea of a person being transported into a video game world was almost totally brand-new. Further, the idea that the world of this virtual “Grid” was, at points, created by self-perpetuating computer programs was a brand of cyberpunk never quite glimpsed in a mainstream movie. Yes, 1982 also gave us Blade Runner, but those AIs were very much tactile, humanoid Replicants who existed in our world. Tron was the reverse: a “Program” was a person, and in the world of the Grid, the Programs created everything.
Now, over four decades after the original Tron, and 15 years after its sequel, Tron: Legacy (2010), the third movie in the franchise — the upcoming movie Tron: Ares — is poised to deliver on a strange promise suggested by the first movie. But is this actually what we wanted way back in 1982?
“The concept was that a program is filming a program,” explains Tron: Ares director Joachim Rønning told Empire in a recent interview. He further asserted that this means the movie is intended to look like “it’s shot by a robot.”
Paradoxically, this upcoming Tron movie will be the first one of the three that occurs more in the “real world” than on the Grid. Several trailers have shown Light Cycles, and helmeted “Programs” seemingly interacting with our world; a change from the previous two films, which was only hinted at in Legacy.
According to the official synopsis of Ares from Disney, the film will focus on “a highly sophisticated program, Ares [Jared Leto], who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind's first encounter with A.I. beings.”
But, now, Rønning’s comments seem to suggest that the point-of-view of the story won’t be solely focused on humankind encountering “A.I. beings,” but rather, from the perspective of those A.I beings coming into our world.
If all of this sounds like a vintage 1980s computer-graphics movie franchise is wading into the conversation around real-world A.I. ethics, that is very much the intent. While the 1982 Tron was dealing in theoretical possibilities, aspects of Tron: Ares are more contemporary. At least, metaphorically.
“So many days on set, we would get the chills,” Ares co-star Greta Lee told Empire. In the movie, Lee is playing Eve Kim, a human who gets involved with Ares. “The ideas that [original Tron director Steven Lisberger] put in place years ago are not just still relevant, but in our faces. Inescapable.”
Tron fights against big algorithms for us. Will the new Tron remember this all-important premise?
Kim has a point. However, one thing that the Tron mythos asserts that isn’t quite in line with the hyped-up autocomplete “A.I.” of today is somewhat elegant and almost old-fashioned. In Tron, the various “A.I. beings” still have individual identities. They all even have Identity Discs in the virtual world of the Grid, which is something that doesn’t really match up with the turbo-charged algorithms of ChatGPT and other so-called A.I. of today.
The titular “Tron” in Tron, for example, is an independent security program, created by Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) in the first movie. This would be like if some hacker made a benevolent independent algorithm today, complete with a personality, and designed it to push back against the arbitrary and selective information summaries which are vomited out by ChatGPT or Grok on a daily basis.
In short, what Tron suggested in 1982 was that there would need to be some kind of A.I. check on other A.I. programs. The enemy in the original Tron was the Master Control Program. We basically have that today in the form of Google. What we don’t have is a hero Program, Tron, who fights for the users. Hopefully, Tron: Ares can deliver that. But, the promise of a movie “shot by a robot” doesn’t sound all that encouraging, or particularly new.
