The third film in the Tron franchise, Tron: Ares, flips the script and instead of spending its time with humans trapped in an alternate universe of cyberspace dealing with self-aware computer programs, computer programs come into the ‘real’ world and deal with us.

Walt Disney Studios

The principal technological advancement in this feature is the creation of digital objects and people in reality, much like Star Trek’s replicators from the later series. The creations, however, can only last 29 minutes before evaporating painfully back into nothing. The McGuffin of the film is the ‘permanence code,’ a bit of software that would allow created material to exist sans any time limit.

Fighting to possess this software is the evil Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of the original film’s villain, seeking the power for military purposes and his own aggrandizement. Julian is countered by the movie’s protagonist, Eve Kim, CEO of ENCOM, the firm that was formerly headed by Kevin Flynn, Tron’s original protagonist. She, of course, is tortured by emotional trauma of the past but seeks the code for the betterment of humanity.

Pursuing Eve in the real world to seize the code from her is the military program Ares (Jared Leto), self-aware and slowly becoming more than his code defines.

Tron: Ares holds no real surprises. Every plot point is one that can be expected to take place, every character revelation is something well-trod in the annals of scriptwriting. The callbacks to the original film are delivered as expected, and this is a film that presented nothing in deeply shaded complexity.

All that said, sometimes all you need is a ‘popcorn movie.’ Something that makes little to no demands on the intellect and instead simply invites you to sit back, enjoy your popcorn, and lose yourself in a grand and well-executed spectacle. That is Tron: Ares. I watched the movie in 3-D, and this paid off handsomely—the visual effects were dazzling in 3-D, and the director, Joachim Rønning, resisted the urge to thrust too many things directly at the camera.

If you are looking for a bit of fun and can switch off any nagging issues of physics, then you could do worse on a Saturday afternoon than Tron: Ares.