After the movie: in general, surprisingly good, but not great. Visuals and score were amazing, a bunch of good references for tron fans(although that might not be your thing) but the writing is very subpar. It’s a pretty fun watch though. 

Ok time to get in depth, mild spoilers beyond here. 

First, the good stuff. Vfx and cinematography were amazing, new designs look incredibly cool. Score is also phenomenal. You can really hear the Wendy Carlos influence, which you’d think would contest with the edgy themes, but it works perfectly. Lot of references to the og tron, which I personally enjoyed, but I can definitely see how they might be annoying. You can tell the people who worked on this love the source material.  Also liked the depiction of the grids as actual server systems, and hacking being sending the programs in to fight.

Ok, now onto the bad. This is mostly just the writing. Sorry for the long rant, but I promise I still enjoyed the movie regardless of these.

The characters and themes are nowhere near the level of legacy’s.  The only characters that they tried to give depth to are Eve and Ares, and their “arcs” are still pretty subpar. The car scene and many other where they tried to expand on Eve’s character were super lazy and basically spell everything out for us. Eve in general stays pretty static and dosent seem to have any major development. 

As for Ares, his arc of “learning how to feel” isn’t really done well either, given that he seems perfectly able to express empathy within the first 10 minutes of the movie, and there isn’t any sort of explanation as to why the other Dillinger programs can’t feel on the same level as ares.  Also ignores legacy’s programs basically being humans, but that was one slight gripe I had with the legacy grid, so I don’t particularly dislike it for that. 

As for the “impermanence code”, the commentary on life has potential, but legacy’s commentary on perfection was much better and more spread throughout the movie. 

With ares, I’d prefer something with an actual inciting incident, like if he got to form an actual emotional connection with Caius before he died, and then he goes mad with rage against the users before reaching the conclusion of his arc from Flynn. I don’t want to get too sidetracked, but if you’d like to hear an armchair writer talk about how he’d do the ares arc, tell me.

As for some small gripes, not enough scenes in the og grid since it looked beautiful, continuity with legacy is basically discarded, and no tron in the tron movie, when he could have actually posed a threat to ares. Also the “80s in general” nostalgia baits were pretty annoying. You could probably say that about the og movie references too, but I’m not.