After 43 years, Tron: Ares reverses the paradigm of its predecessors — indeed, the premise of the franchise — by bringing the inhabitants inside computers into our world rather than bringing us into theirs. Somehow, and quite uninspiringly, this translates less into a meditation on consciousness and free will than a feature-length advertisement for 3D printers.

Directed by Joachim Rønning, this third chapter in the series picks up where Joe Kosinski’s TRON: Legacy left off, and somehow ends up there as well, with “the grid” and gritty reality still only beginning to explore the ramifications of the other. Casting the decidedly polarizing Jared Leto as the eponymous program Ares, the object of both worlds’ obsession, does the film no favors in keeping audiences at arm’s length, even with the eminently appealing Greta Lee as his human counterpart.

But the bigger problem is a messy script more interested in bouncing between the two worlds for loud, fast-paced action sequences than exploring (or even acknowledging) the decades-old quandaries of their parallel existence.

TRON: Ares Retraces Its Predecessors’ Choices Instead Of Rectifying Them

Lee (Past Lives) plays ENCOM CEO Eve Kim, a tech genius driven by the death of her late, equally brilliant sister to uncover “the permanence code,” a sliver of programming that enables digital creations to survive in the real world. Her chief compeтιтor, Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), is also hunting for the code, and unafraid to indulge in a bit of corporate espionage to obtain it: he hacks ENCOM’s mainframe using the pioneering security program Ares (Leto).

When Julian is unsuccessful in acquiring the code electronically, he brings Ares and his confederate Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) into the real world to capture Eve, who carries the only copy on a flash drive. But after being inspired by a demonstration of compᴀssion by Eve, Ares offers to protect her in exchange for using the code to bring him to life. In response to Ares’ betrayal, Julian enlists Athena to carry out the program’s mission, but soon discovers that her commitment to following orders leads to destructive consequences in both the digital and real worlds.

In an era of CGI pH๏τorealism, it’s tough to overstate what made the geometric, neon aesthetic of TRON feel so special. It was at once totally foreign to the real world, but entirely convincing within the confines of what audiences imagined transpired each time they plugged a quarter into a video game or turned on their computers.

The argument for a more “naturalistic” version of The Grid is that it was conceived in the mind of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who died in TRON: Legacy trying to escape it. But the result in Ares is two realities that are just not different enough to be particularly exciting, and that’s fairly catastrophic for a film that means to show audiences something they’ve never seen.

Most of Tron: Ares​​​​​​’s imagination is devoted to references from earlier films: an orange, reconsтιтuted in a computer’s mind; impenetrable walls of energy sawing objects into pieces; a menacing face and booming voice bearing down from cyberspace on its obedient programs. As the worlds become commingled, Eve eventually goes into Dillinger’s server, and Ares spends time contemplating the sensual pleasures of rainfall and, uh, Depeche Mode (not Journey?).

But is this a world that actually knows that Kevin Flynn lived for years in a computer, or that his son Sam visited one and brought back his own digital companion, Quorra? The technology to move between worlds clearly exists and is used repeatedly. Has anyone actually used it in 15 years before Julian decides it’s the best way to acquire the permanence code? The movie possesses reams of intriguing ideas, but instead reheats much of Legacy‘s plot and then busies itself with semi-incomprehensible set pieces.

With David Fincher stalwarts Jeff Cronenweth as cinematographer and Tyler Nelson as editor (plus support from Ridley Scott’s Pietro Scalia), Rønning ᴀssembles a team that should be able to deliver thrilling action, especially with Nine Inch Nails providing their backbeat. But the movie’s determination to pack in dialogue — particularly in a digital “jet ski chase” where Eve and Ares hammer out their partnership while missiles trail behind — renders them noisy and incoherent. Too many scenes feel like they started from a place of “it would be cool if…” and then nobody worried much about how they fit into the story.

That said, Lee exudes the kind of warmth and compᴀssion, if not always the seriousness one might expect from a tech company CEO, that almost makes it feel like there is some meaning to everything. Sadly, the loss that drives her gets lost in the business of banging around a city on a light cycle or battling a Recognizer with a couple of F16s whose pilots seem only too willing to deploy heavy artillery over a major metropolitan area.

Leto, meanwhile, is simply not the actor you want leading audiences on a journey to discover the complicated pleasures of humanity; he manages to be pretty and vacant in the role when what you need is someone yearning to feel.

One of the most egregious offenses the film commits is with its score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross under their musical moniker. Both Wendy Carlos’ score for TRON and Daft Punk’s for Legacy mimicked the burbling of computers while layering in emotionality with complex orchestral arrangements.

Not only is Nine Inch Nails’ music here not organic to the film’s world, but it offers no sense of direction for the viewer, suggesting that Reznor and Ross had no sense of the emotional journey they were tasked with shaping. The action scenes are loud and throbbing, but there’s no sense of momentum or payoff. To deliver this just a year after the music for Challengers, a film that leaned hard on techno to create such propulsive, infectious energy, is a profound disappointment.

Ultimately, Rønning’s greatest sin is to reinforce a longstanding critique of the franchise, that its films are more interested in images than ideas. Unfortunately, what he’s created is an action movie that happens to involve computers as part of its plot.

Maybe that’s enough for some, but watching the brief interlude where Ares visits the landscape of the original 1982 movie, it feels like the moment where TRON: Ares ever so briefly comes to life, transporting its audience to a place that’s weird and interesting. The rest unfolds too much like one of those automatic updates that pops up on your computer: after the possibilities introduced by downloading it long ago, this latest version feels, at best, obligatory and underwhelming.