Now that the dust has settled on Tron: Ares, it’s fine to reveal one huge truth about the movie: Despite its many wonderful qualities and utter commitment to its basic premise, Tron: Ares does not contain the actual Tron anywhere in its breezy two-hour runtime, nor in the post-credits. And while there are some super-deep cuts in Ares, the presentation of Tron himself is not one of them. Is this okay? Can hardcore Tron heads — who delight in pointing out Tron is a person, not a place — wrap their minds around an entertaining Tron movie which lacks Tron?
The answer is complicated. Ares actually works decently well without having Jared Leto team-up with a digitally de-aged Bruce Boxleitner. (See Tron: Legacy for how that went last time.) And by having the hero Program of Tron: Ares actually start as a program created by a villain, this Tron film scores some clever transgressive points. But the absence of Tron actually connects to a strange paradox created by the casting in the original film: Flynn and Tron are, in some ways, visually very similar. And so, including a literal Tron figure in Tron: Ares might have messed with the mojo of the story.
