Tron: Ares Is a Bad Movie, but a Great Nine Inch Nails Music Video 

The funniest part of Tron: Ares comes at the beginning. There’s a screenplay credit. Apparently, someone actually wrote this movie. There’s a separate story credit too, which is even harder to fathom. Sure, things happen. There are characters with names. There are events and images. Occasionally, it looks pretty cool. But a story? That’s a stretch. 

The best argument for Tron: Ares is that it’s not really a movie, but a feature-length Nine Inch Nails music video built out of Tron-inspired imagery. 

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the duo who make up the two full-time members of Nine Inch Nails (NIN), have been composing some of the most electric, most groundbreaking scores in Hollywood for well over a decade. But this is the first time they’ve used the famous industrial rock band’s moniker on a movie. 

Often, the duo’s dense, digitally moody work has been paired with subversive, excellent filmmaking—Challengers, The Social Network, even Pixar’s Soul. (If in 1999, you’d told me the guy who wrote “Hurt,” “March of the Pigs,” and a despairing double album about depression and addiction would one day produce the soundtrack to an animated Disney film, I’m not sure I would have believed you.) 

Here, the NIN score is the only thing that keeps the movie going. Lending the band’s name to film feels like an act of generosity; you can charitably treat this as a series of whiz-bang sci-fi visuals made to accompany a pretty good Nine Inch Nails album. 

Granted, I’m a Nine Inch Nails diehard, so I’m inclined to be charitable where their contributions are concerned. 

The rest of the movie is harder to justify. This is the second sequel to Tron, the 80s vintage movie about a video game fanatic (Jeff Bridges) who finds himself transported into the digital bowels of a computer—essentially the world of a game. 

Today, the movie looks cheesy and dated in certain ways. But its tech-forward design sensibility remains striking, and it was thematically prescient for its time. It understood the power of both computers generally and video games specifically, and grasped, before most of the world really understood, that the pairing would eventually produce vast virtual worlds. Tron‘s most memorable moments are video game-like special effects sequences featuring light-cycles and ominous, blocky, vector-graphics-inspired ships—but the movie also gave viewers a distinctive world with a particular culture, rooted in the technology of its day. What Tron understood better than almost any film up until The Matrix was that interconnected computers would create more than just on-screen graphics and symbols; they would eventually amount to a virtual place, a sort of country with its own particular people and folkways. 

Tron: Legacy, the 2010 follow-up by director Joseph Kosinski, looked cooler and slicker, but had less to say about the internal computer world that made the original so fascinating. Rather, it treated the original as a design fetish object—a sort of retro-cool, cyberpunk home goods catalog, like 1980s J. Crew reimagining itself through AI. (Oh wait, J. Crew actually did that.)

The story wasn’t exactly cutting edge, but it took a step forward from the original, asking what would happen if a digital simulacra of Jeff Bridges’ character had stayed inside the computer world and gone rogue, like Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. It was style over substance, but it was hard to argue with the style: The movie’s signature sequence was a disco-style barroom brawl, DJed by in-computer versions of Daft Punk. 

Neither Reznor nor Ross appear in Tron: Ares. But their soundtrack pumps through nearly every minute of the movie, shaping its half-baked dialogue and barely coherent narrative into something resembling a sick vibe. Previous Tron films have focused on people who enter the franchise’s light-enhanced computer world. In Ares, the premise is reversed, with signature elements from the series’ computer world entering the real world. There’s a nifty motorcycle sequence set in downtown San Francisco, and at the end, a bridge-shaped Recognizer ship looms over the city’s nighttime sky. The sleek cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth looks crisp and cool, and the totalizing pulse of the NIN score makes it easy to forget how dull the movie is otherwise: flat characters, rotten dialogue, a plot you’ll forget before the credits roll. 

But if you treat it like an experimental music video—something resembling an industrial rock version of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour movie, but for moody dudes who grew up in the 90s—it nearly works as a pure audiovisual experience. In a theater with a properly booming sound system, the electronic thuds and warped synths supplied by Reznor and Ross are properly disorienting; it almost feels like you’re lost inside a computer, overwhelmed by an electronic world made of bits and bytes but not tactile reality or common sense. Maybe that was the idea after all.