Time to ride: Jared Leto in ‘Tron: Ares’.
TRON: ARES ***1/2 (119 minutes) M
After the advent of 2010’s cosmically underwhelming Tron: Legacy – delivered some 28 years since Disney’s landmark 1982 CGI pioneer Tron – we weren’t exactly hankering for another serving from the Tron universe.
So how gratifying it is to find Tron: Ares unspooling with such energy, visual dazzle and a story about the bridge between the real world and the digital realm, which Tron reconfigured as a place where computer programs assumed human form and lived in beautifully designed, neon-lined cities that pulsated with electricity.
Here we have Jared Leto, still bearing his signature Jesus hair, playing the titular Master Program who discovers he’s working for the bad guys and so breaks into the real world to correct matters.
His crusade involves protecting programmer Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who has access to an invaluable bit of software that will keep things conjured from the digital world into the real world from disintegrating after 29 minutes. It’s an engaging, world-altering conceit.
Fabulously paced and mainly playing it straight – the mandatory comic relief aside – director Joachim Rønning keeps things tight and remarkably comprehensible, maintaining and impressively lucid narrative alongside all the fabulous action, which includes a great motorcycle chase.
For all its high-tech flash and sparkle, the film does tap into the century-old theme about the perils of technology and the dangers of placing too much trust into our you-beaut gizmos.
Coupled to that is the equally ancient fear of cyber sentience, where machines that were designed to take directives from humans develop their own thoughts and feelings. The idea is very well baked over here.
Another boon for the film, and what a pleasant surprise this is, involves the duty of every distant sequel to respectfully nod towards its parent.
We’ve seen this ritual in most sequels yet, to its credit, the salute given here to the ground-breaking computer graphics of Tron – the film largely, though not solely, responsible for the evolution of digital animation (The Last Starfighter played its part, too) – is so marvellously rendered it’ll likely mist over the eyes of hardcore fans.
BEAST OF WAR *** (87 minutes) MA
So soon after the fabulous B-movie excesses of Primitive War comes Beast of War, another highly proficient, Australian-made creature feature that unashamedly embraces genre conventions to deliver a very satisfying, over-the-top survival chompfest.
After a Japanese attack, a group of WW2 Australian soldiers find themselves in the middle of a mist-laden ocean on the floating debris of their sunken ship.
To be sure, it’s a sufficiently dire situation in no need of further enhancement by the unwelcome attention of a giant shark, its dorsal fin cutting through the water’s calm surface with menacing silence, announcing to the frightened men that it’s chow time.
Written and slickly directed by genre-loving Kiah Roache-Turner (Sting; Wyrmwood 1&2), the film opens with a strong prologue that neatly sets up the characters and the tensions between them, an indigenous soldier (Mark Coles Smith) being the main focus.
Crammed with unavoidable references to Jaws – you gotta have those underwater shots of potential victims, don’t you? – there’s blood, gore, dismembered limbs and screaming aplenty.
The film also serves as a much-needed response to Dangerous Animals, the awful Aussie horror film that berated the image of sharks as man-eating monsters and whined about what poor, misunderstood fish they are.
What baloney.
THE TRAVELLERS * (97 minutes) M
We will never stop thanking Bruce Beresford for the formidable legacy of films he has directed, many of which helped establish Australian cinema as a cultural force.
Same goes for Bryan Brown, an actor of truly legendary status.
The two last worked together on 1980’s Breaker Morant, a film that still stands as an Australian classic.
The Travellers marks their reunion. Such a pedigree. Yet what a dud.
So, what happened?
Written by Beresford, the film is an attempt at a heartfelt, feelgood family dramedy about a successful stage designer Stephen (Luke Bracey) who returns from Europe to work out with his sister Nikki (Susie Porter) what to do with their elderly, wise-cracking dad Fred (Brown).
Given what an accomplished movie storyteller Beresford is it is difficult to account for why the film is so dramatically weak, with story holes, stilted performances (what happened there?), implausible character arcs and flat dialogue running throughout the piece.
Also, the ads for the film are a tad misleading, creating the impression that The Travellers has Bryan Brown playing the main character.
He’s not. Fred is but a supporting character in the story of Stephen, who turns out to be not-very-interesting nor, to be frank, all that likeable, even though he wears a cravat.
Sadly, the film has the look and feel of the type of clunky Australian fare we sat through in the 1980s, ironically the type of film Beresford’s work ran counter to.
What a letdown.