Cyberpunk

I promise not to make a habit of complaining about things here, but there's something specific I want to complain about in Tron: Ares. And while I know the cool thing to do on the internet is to complain about Jared Leto, it isn't that.

Let's say you're a billionaire CEO and want to make a movie. Who would be the main character? Well, obviously a billionaire CEO, they're the most important people on the planet. But oh no! there's a conflict in this movie! Who could possibly resolve this conflict? Obviously a billionaire CEO, they're also the smartest people on the planet. Hmmm, we should probably have other characters in this movie so they can tell the CEO how amazing and brilliant they are... let's add some of the poors into this movie, like the billionaire CEO's personal assistant. After all, he's "one of the good ones."

That's what Tron: Ares feels like to me. The protagonist and antagonist are both CEOs and the only other named characters in this movie are either 1) personal assistants to the CEO or 2) sentient intellectual property. There isn't a single named character in this movie who isn't on a first-name basis with the CEO. We couldn't possibly have the R&D department work on any of these problems, or have a security detail manage the safety of the CEO. No, only the CEO is capable of doing these things by themselves.

As a fan of cyberpunk, I just can't take a CEO protagonist seriously. So many cyberpunk works have an underlying theme of "the rich aren't human anymore" and it bugs me to root for the "good" billionaire.

Also, it's weird that the only other people in the movie who these CEOs respect... are other CEOs. We couldn't have the audience just assume a CEO would respect his mother, let's make his mother the previous CEO. And we couldn't have the audience just assume a CEO would respect her sister, let's make her sister the Co-CEO (whatever that means). The movie could've just as easily made the sister the head of R&D or something, but no, she had to be a reclusive scientist working in the arctic... who is also a CEO.

Obviously the visuals are amazing, but the plot is so awkwardly skewed towards CEOs that it feels forced. I guess you could say Tron: Legacy had a "trust-fund baby" protagonist (a reluctant billionaire?) but that entire movie was spent inside The Grid so his money was irrelevant. Tron: Ares spent the bulk of the movie in the real world where the CEOs were specifically using the assets available to them to drive the story forward.

There, see? I didn't complain about Jared Leto once.