Off the Grid: TRON: ARES

Tron: Ares has a great concept for a Tron movie. It brings the inner world of the computer to the real world with a villainous tech company’s high-tech 3D printer zip-zapping evil programs out of the cloud into corporeal form. After two movies about people being zapped into the computer, it’s about time to flip the direction. The fun of seeing the fluorescent-accented bodysuit-wearing warriors and glowing energy vehicles swooping down San Francisco streets makes for a pleasing contrast. Add to that a thumping and throbbing Nine Inch Nails rock score and there’s all the aesthetic markers for a satisfying blockbuster. What a let down, then, that the whole thing feels so anemic as the journey to the real world is focused on the entirely wrong character. The warring tech titans are played by talented actors. On the side of good is Greta Lee, who’s hopping the globe looking for an old magic algorithm that’ll allow her to print real crops and save the world. On the side of evil is Evan Peters and Gillian Anderson who are trying to beat their corporate rivals to the control of this tech. But instead of settling into that understandable human conflict, the story is perched on Ares, a dead-eyed program who shambles toward something like self-awareness as he’s tasked with the baddies’ bidding until a glitch causes him to seek to rewrite his own code. In a movie that’s already under-serving its human characters with hollow blockbuster plotting and thin motivations, it’s a shame to take even a little real rooting interest and drive it into something as superfluous and vacant as the empty inner mind of a machine. 

This is already a series of false starts. The 1982 original is a strange artifact, a one-off sci-fi boondoggle in which Jeff Bridges is cast adrift on a sea of chunky, simple early CG landscapes. The sequel didn’t emerge until 2010, well after that first film was an established cult object. Tron: Legacy is an across-the-board improvement, fully activating the ideas’ potential with a tighter emotional focus on a long lost father (Bridges) and a troubled grown son (Garrett Hedlund) reunited in the vast digital grid. It’s also an elegantly exciting aesthetic experience, a fitting directorial debut for the speed and sensation of Top Gun 2 and F1’s Joseph Kosinski. He makes Legacy glowing neon propulsive spectacle, with a hard-driving Daft Punk score and a swooping camera hurtling through its digital spaces. Ares is a retreat from all of that fun and innovation. It has neither the quaint eccentricities of the first, nor the non-stop dazzlement of the second. And it forgets that the concept worked best through hooking into real human feeling. This belated follow-up, despite smooth professional lensing and decent bludgeoning sound, never jolts to life. It is an inert artifact, drafting off dusty references and tropes. Turns out the only reason we cared about the cool-looking and -sounding earlier efforts set in Tron’s computers was the personal touch.

This film is impersonally crafted as pure product. Director Joachim Rønning’s made a habit of producing lesser sequels to live-action Disney fantasy hits, having previously handled Pirates of the Caribbean 5 and Maleficent 2. He’s a competent craftsman, though. His best work is the Disney live-action sports movie Young Woman and the Sea, as sturdy an example of the form as that type gives us. He knows how to hit the beats and bring a screenplay to life. As such, Ares pops with red grids and pixelated chaos, and does indeed have a bit of a charge from putting the computer things on real city streets. But there’s just not enough there there to disguise the mercenary element involved. Of course all movies, especially those at this scale, are commercial products. But this one’s empty enough to make you sit there thinking about why the company would take another crack at a franchise that’s only barely before worked for their balance sheets, and then only through the modest long-tail cult audience. Even as this one sinks at the box office, they’ll surely sell plenty of theme park tickets for the Tron ride, and Blu-ray box sets (as a completionist, I’ll get one), and copies of the soundtrack album (NIN’s thrashing electric tones are the clear highlight; I’ll buy one of those discs, too). Maybe in another decade or three they’ll take another swing at it jump-starting the series. For now, this is a sad case of a promising movie in which everyone involved is on the same page. It’s just the wrong page.

Time After Time: PAST LIVES

Thirty-six is young enough to feel like a massive life change is still possible, but also old enough to have a lot of vivid “what ifs” that have closed off some possibilities entirely. I’m sure I’m not the first to draw a metaphor comparing living your life to catching a flight. If your childhood is the runway, and your twenties are takeoff, then your thirties have to be the point where you feel you’re at cruising altitude. You’re far enough along to relax into a routine, see the shape of the horizon, while still knowing you have a long way until you reach your final destination. What if? There’s still time. Here’s Past Lives, a wistful and fragile little movie borne aloft by those doubts and those “what ifs” as its 36-year-old characters turn inwards, and backwards, for just a few days. They’re in a blend of nostalgic reverie and deep contemplation that, together and apart, cause them to reflect on their lives’ routes so far, and the other paths that had to be foreclosed to get there.

It starts at the turn of the 21st century, where two 12-year-old South Korean classmates’ friendship is teetering on the edge of romantic feelings. They sit close in class. They talk on their slow walks home. Their moms arrange a date in the park. She cries after getting a lower grade on a test than she’d expected, and he calmly stands there, awkwardly, silently, supportive. It’s all very sweet and cute, a first blush of real, deep connection in a pre-adolescent way that arises out of affection and proximity. When her family immigrates to Canada before the next school year, they don’t see each other, they don’t speak, they don’t stay in touch. More than a decade passes. The movie’s main drama—softly spoken, precisely observed—happens in two following parts: a fleeting long-distance friendship, and a long-awaited reunion on the streets of New York City a decade after that. In their mid-thirties for the film’s present tense culmination, she (Greta Lee) is a married American, and he (Teo Yoo) has just broken up with his girlfriend back in Seoul. The emotional tension swells through the two time jumps ellipsis, empty narrative space we fill in with the context clues, and the nuanced performances in which whole decades well up through body language and eye movements, as every silence swells with the unspoken.

Though it has the raw material of overheated melodrama, the confident grace and simplicity of writer-director Celine Song’s debut feature carries off a poised empathy. It’s not building to the stuff of high drama, but of small realizations, shifts in thoughtful connection, self-knowledge, and lost potentials. It embodies the melancholy wonderings of a wandering mind, traveling back to those moments in life where another choice would’ve taken you an entirely different direction. This isn’t even a movie about regrets, per se. Her husband (John Magaro) is as well-adjusted and empathetic as you could ask. This allows for a movie about the headspace a reunion can generate—and Song’s sensitive writing and cozy filmic lensing allows for the characters to explore their complicated emotions kicked up by the grown person before them being simultaneously the tween they once knew, and a stranger they’ve never known. They see some lost part of themselves reflected back in a stranger’s eyes. The movie’s generous enough to play that out with compassionate contemplation, and the final emotional release is all the more potent for it.

Doing It For Themselves: SISTERS

Two adult siblings learn their parents have sold the family house when they’re told to show up and pack up all the junk left in their childhood bedrooms. Sad to let the last vestiges of youth go, the pair orchestrates one last party, a raucous blowout to remember the good old days. If this plot – thinly developed and overfamiliar – was the engine for a movie called Brothers and starred any two generic bros it would be insufferable, one more man-child comedy indulging carousing until reluctant maturity arrives. But it’s called Sisters (no relation to the DePalma of the same name), and stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, a great pairing for a fine gender swap of the usual potty-mouth party movie. The result is an injection of fresh perspective into a tired formula, a mix of sex talk and sentimentality that’s energized by its leads.

Only Fey and Poehler’s second film together in leading roles (after 2008’s pleasant Baby Mama), they’re a fine comedy duo. With a fizzy improvisatory approach to line readings, turning every punchline and extended bit into agreeably off-the-cuff coziness, they have sharp timing and a believable sisterly dynamic. Fey is the older sister, louder and irresponsible, freshly fired from a salon job, kicked out of the apartment where she’d been staying. Her careless approach to life has led to her teen daughter (Madison Davenport) pushing her away. Poehler is the little sister, an overeager perfectionist who has thrown herself into micromanaged routines as a way of avoiding stewing over a divorce, and worrying about their elderly parents (Dianne Wiest and James Brolin). Each sees a bit of what they wish they could be in the other – Fey wants a smidge more structure; Poehler wants to loosen up – but they cant say so. Instead, realistic levels of sibling rivalry manifest as admiration and antagonism going both ways.

Reunited in their hometown, under the same roof, they hatch their partying plan, to recapture good times they feel have slipped away. They have to go backwards to go forwards. The script by Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock writer Paula Pell sees the women’s immaturity without condoning it, allowing for a loose and agreeable non-judgmental atmosphere, especially as the house fills up with their former high school classmates, the ones who never left town and just settled down. They see right away these folks (Maya Rudolph, John Leguizamo, Bobby Moynihan, Rachel Dratch, Samantha Bee, and more) have gotten older, and are dealing with adult problems and aging concerns. It doesn’t take long spending time at the house party for the guests to loosen way up (the booze helps, no doubt), the gathering getting progressively rowdier and more destructive as the night goes on.

Pitch Perfect director Jason Moore throws a decent bash, keeping the festivities hopping with pounding music and funny running gags. Fey tries not to drink and be the responsible one for once, while Poehler downs the intoxicants and flirts half-successfully with a sweet handyman (Ike Barinholtz). A desperately unfunny dope gets increasingly deranged. A muscle-bound drug-dealer (John Cena) stands still in the middle of the revelers, silently blinking. A sad woman zones out in front of a wall of clocks, contemplating her mortality. A mom gets drunk, an overgrown mean girl tries to sabotage, and a pedicurist (Greta Lee) takes advantage of an overflowing washing machine to start a slippery bubble fight. These scenes are shot for warm laughs and agreeable chuckles in simple bright sitcom staging, and feel like they could be flipped around without much damage to the overall arc.

It’s just one eventful collection of banter and silly sights, driven forward only by the gradually more destroyed house. But the result is a fine hangout with earnest good vibes. Fey and Poehler are fantastic ringleaders, both egging on and reigning in the absurdity as it goes along. They’re committed to looking pathetic, and as the party drags on it’s clear they’re going to hit rock bottom. (The movie ends up taking this idea very literally.) It ends with a pat moral conveniently tying up plot threads, but the trip there is a loose amusing time, turning standard R-rated comedy fare into a breezy sister act.