Is it a good thing when you roll out your big, flashy trailer for your new, presumably very expensive Tron movie, and the first thought that passes through our heads is, “Huh, this kind of reminds me of the Adam Sandler video game comedy Pixels“?
This question brought to you by the new trailer for Tron: Ares, which Disney showed off to attendees at CinemaCon earlier this week, and which has now been deployed for us plebes. We won’t lie and tell you that the trailer’s first big money shot—a cop car getting cut in half after the Game Grid lightcycle it’s trailing behind activates its “big deadly wall of light” thing—isn’t cool. But director Joachim Rønning seems to be massively over-estimating how scary it is to see one of those weird floaty Tron ships that look like crane game claws floating over a human city—especially since a) the glimpses of the computer world we get in this suggests that it now also looks sort of like a city, and b) having a black-and-red neon CGI creation floating in a night-time city full of bright lights doesn’t actually evoke the otherworldly surrealism or contrast that the whole “worlds collide” premise would suggest.
We might be judging Tron: Ares too harshly on too little information here, but there’s so much potential in the idea of Grid creations breaking out into the real world, and so little of it on display here, that we can’t help but get irked. We also don’t get any real glimpses of the film’s characters, outside of some close-ups of star Jared Leto having a body built for himself in meatspace, and the usual brief moment of happy recognition we get any time Gillian Anderson successfully cashes a paycheck. Soundtrack sounds good at least, with Nine Inch Nails contributing new tunes for the film ahead of its October 10 release.
