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Tron: Ares (2025)
Known more for its cutting-edge visual effects, the Tron series has long felt like a franchise that Disney keeps trying to reanimate every generation with the hopes that this time, this time, it won’t be ahead of its time and merely of its time and a measurable hit. I think the issue I’ve had with the Tron movies, the original in 1982 and the 2010 glitzy sequel by debut director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), is that the computer world that the characters get sucked into is, quite simply, boring. The world-building of life inside the computer is dominated by design and less by depth. It’s cool-looking and sleek and alien but it’s also over-glorified setting details without a larger sense of life. That’s probably why every movie has dealt with the threat of the computer world coming into the real world. That’s where Tron: Ares does right, spending far more time in the real world than the computer one, with a flesh-and-blood character (Greta Lee) traveling into the computer realm and a digital one (Jared Leto) traveling out to track her down. On the outside is a war between two tech companies, both racing to be able to replicate structures from the computer world into our own, except they disintegrate after 30 minutes. This is a smart limitation as it naturally presents a goal, to outlast this measure, but it also presents a ticking clock for our computer programs tracking down their missions. Much of the characterization is Leto’s security program, Ares, becoming self-aware and questioning the orders of his superiors, which makes for a pretty predictable arc from a pretty stoic if tedious character. He’s simply the cool fighter that we need for cool fighting, and admittedly, there are plenty of cool fights here. The Tron visual aesthetic of force movements creating warriors makes for some nifty images, especially when those barriers are used for strategic purposes in escapes or combat. You could mentally check out from all the tech mumbo-jumbo and just enjoy the pleasure of the sci-fi action, especially with Nine Inch Nails (really Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross) providing the sonic musical accompaniment. I don’t know if I’ll ever really love a Tron movie but there’s enough offered with Ares that allows me to at least like a Tron movie.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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A House of Dynamite (2025)
Director Kathryn Bigelow’s first movie in eight years plays to her strengths with a dynamite ensemble cast trying to process a ticking clock of doom and their dwindling options. It’s an incredibly taut and thrilling movie elevated by Bigelow’s penchant for later-career verisimilitude. A nuclear missile is launched from an Asian country (North Korea? Russia? It’s never clarified) and heading for the American Midwest. The movie replays the chain of events three times and in real-time, first with the initial discovery of the missile and those in charge of launching counter defenses to take it out (a character describes the difficulty as “shooting a bullet with a bullet”). Then with the higher military brass debating whether to launch pre-emptive strikes against foreign countries making moves. Finally, with the president who hasn’t been seen up until this point, keeping the identity of the actor a surprise. He has to make the final decision of what to do as the missile looms and loss of life seems inevitable. I was fairly enthralled by the immediate pacing and the fraught conversations over doomsday planning. It felt like a modern-day and terrifying version of Fail Safe. There’s even room for some human stories here as people contemplate what might be the end, like trying to reach a loved one by phone and summarize a lifetime of feelings for closure, or debating whether or not to stay or leave the incoming danger. Because of the repeated structure of the screenplay, it holds out the missile striking or not striking until the very end. What will the president do? Is it as another character dubs a choice between suicide and surrender? And then…
Spoiler…
the movie just ends. I’m spoiling to protect you, dear reader. It’s not an ambiguous ending. There is no ending. There is no conclusion. I was flabbergasted. It’s like they lopped off the last twenty minutes. How could they do this? It completely ruins the movie for me and the whole experience becomes one of those distaff “we just want you to think” experiments that don’t function as a fully-developed movie. A House of Dynamite (coined from a podcast the president listened to) is a thriller that goes up in smoke.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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