“Tron: Ares” is taking its artificial intelligence plotline quite literally. In a new interview, director Joachim Rønning shared that he wanted certain scenes in the upcoming film to look as if they were shot by a computer program, rather than a person.
“Tron: Ares” is the third installment in the sci-fi franchise that began in 1982 with Jeff Bridges playing a video game programmer who becomes trapped in the digital world. The sequel “Tron: Legacy” was released in 2010 with Garret Hedlund playing Bridges’ onscreen son; Joseph Kosinski directed. Now, Rønning is taking the reins, with Bridges returning for the third film.
Rønning told Empire that he views the process of making “Tron: Ares” as the “the Holy Grail of computer graphics,” especially with the famed Grid becoming even more paramount to the plot. Jared Leto joins the franchise as the titular Ares, the manifestation of a sentient computer program that escapes into the real world. Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Gillian Anderson, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Cameron Monaghan, and Sarah Desjardins also star. The film was announced in 2023.
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Rønning told the outlet that “Tron: Ares” will “elevate” the world and take it “to the next level,” especially due to the motion-controlled camera movements on The Grid. Rønning said he worked to have the camera shots designed as though the lens was being operated by machine. “The concept was that a program is filming a program,” the “Young Woman and the Sea” and “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” director said. “So it’s shot by a robot.”
The official synopsis of the Disney film reads: “‘Tron: Ares’ follows a highly sophisticated program, Ares, who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with AI beings.”
Original “Tron” creator Steven Lisberger added to Empire that the franchise is all about pushing tech to the next level. “Something comes out, and it’s too avant-garde at the time. And then the real world catches up with it,” Lisberger said. “[The Grid in ‘Tron’] has become a symbol of our riding this technology that is going faster than we ever imagined. We’ve integrated into it, and the speed of it is mind-boggling. And in ‘Ares,’ it’s a metaphor for the fact that this technology is moving through every part of our reality.”
