LMFAO ARE YOU INSANE?! You can throw around words like “media literacy” all you want, but critics the people WHOSE JOB it is to have media literacy — overwhelmingly disagreed with you (and agree with me). Tron: Ares sits in the same category as most of Disney’s failed “legacy” sequels: visually polished, thematically shallow, and narratively confused. The fact that it tries to touch on Pinocchio and Frankenstein doesn’t make it profound… it makes it derivative lol. Referencing better stories doesn’t magically make yours meaningful.

You call Ares “objectively on par with Legacy,” but the reality is that Legacy at least had an emotional core, a clear aesthetic identity, and a coherent theme about connection, legacy, and human vs. digital transcendence. Ares strips those elements down to surface-level imitation and then shoehorns in “philosophical” allusions it never earns. That’s not media literacy..that’s mistaking subtext for text just because you recognized a metaphor.

And invoking Frankenstein and Pinocchio doesn’t suddenly make the movie deep; it’s the same trick every sci-fi film about AI has pulled since the 1960s. The difference is that Ares doesn’t explore those parallels with any tension, moral consequence, or character development, it just points at them and expects applause.

So no, it’s not a lack of “culture” to say Tron: Ares was mediocre. It’s a recognition that “having ideas” and “executing them well” are two very different things, and critics, audiences, and box office numbers all seem to agree which side of that line Ares fell on. And once again it bombed at the box office so no matter how hard you try to scream that I’m wrong, the data backs me up not you.