Stella’s crisis of conscience reaches its boiling point during a high-stakes presentation of said AI technology that goes off the rails, with the chatbot disclosing personal—and very damaging—information about Stella, leading her to resign from UBN. In voiceover, Stella maligns her descent from “smart, hardworking, steady” to “someone who does the job without expecting credit, who will shrink herself when asked, who won’t cause any trouble” at the helm. “Be who they want you to be until you can’t,” she says.
Says Lee, “The network broke her, but in all fairness, she’s not a victim. She’s someone who entered this position, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, full of ambition and drive. She was reimagining what the news could be. But the world was not moving in the same direction. I mean, here we are now, it’s 2025 and DEI is considered, like, a slur.”
Following her network fall from grace, Stella passes the baton to her trusted former colleague Mia (Karen Pittman), who managed to rise in the corporate ranks without getting consumed by the pressure to conform. “We ugly cried our way through that scene for hours. We have so much love for each other,” says Lee, growing visibly emotional. “Karen and I are both mothers. Both women of color. We have had to navigate certain spoken and unspoken challenges within the world, and there’s so much that is unsaid between Stella and Mia in every moment that is completely understood without it being articulated. I still get teary when I think about that.”
After the AI incident, Stella and Miles decide to run away together to Italy, but he stands her up at the airport after Celine gives him an ultimatum. But Lee has higher hopes for her character. “I want her to be on a beach having a nice, tall tiki drink. Maybe I’m projecting something,” she admits, smiling. Still, “The ultimate liberation is to fail and to be unburdened by the weight of carrying the torch.”
Title:Tron: Ares Describe This Movie Using One Dragnet Quote: FRIDAY: Reckless endangerment of human life, willful disregard of private property, failure to signal for a lane change. STREEBECK: Yeah, he’s really raking up the violations, isn’t he? FRIDAY: Not him, you. Brief Plot Synopsis: Tech CEO teams up with sentient security program played by Jared Leto … wait, come back! Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 3 Frankenstein’s monsters out of 5.
Tagline: “No going back.” Better Tagline: “Stop trying to make A.I. happen.” Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: ENCOM, the tech/gaming company formerly run by Kevin Flynn, is in a race with Dillinger Systems to obtain something called the Permanence Code, which will allow objects rendered in our world from cyberspace to outlast their current 29-minute lifespan. ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee) has the inside track, as the code is hidden in one of Flynn’s old gaming servers. However, rival CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) has a trick up his sleeve: a security program named “Ares” (Jared Leto) that may or may not have more human goals in mind.
“Critical” Analysis: Tron was always a weird choice for a franchise property. The 1982 original — still the most visually arresting movie about intellectual property disputes ever made — was lauded for its special effects*, but otherwise dragged for being a gorgeous snooze-fest. Somehow, director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick, F1) convinced Disney to make a sequel nearly 30 years later. Tron: Legacy was, like its predecessor, incoherent yet pretty to look at.
Now it’s Joachim Rønning’s turn. Disney kept things in house by bringing on the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Maleficent director for our latest descent into the Grid. One thing you have to give to Tron: Ares that you couldn’t always say about the first two movies: it isn’t boring.
There are actually lots of things you can say about Ares. For one, Rønning and screenwriter Jesse Wigutow made the decision to set most of the action in the meatspace, where Dillinger (grandson of David Warner’s character from Tron and (presumably) son of Cillian Murphy’s uncredited Ed Jr. in Legacy) wants ENCOM’s code to shore up his pending A.I. contracts with the military. It’s a smart move — considering the groundbreaking F/X of the original were already old hat by 2010 — and helps ground the story.
Or as grounded as a story about sentient code repeatedly violating the First Law of Thermodynamics can be, anyway.
They also steer the protagonist arc mostly away from the Flynns. It’s the worst kept secret outside of Trump being named in the Epstein Files that Jeff Bridges is back in Ares (for maybe 10 minutes) as the virtual Kevin Flynn, but neither hide nor hair is to be seen of Garret Hedlund’s Sam, and that’s fine, really. Instead, we have Greta Lee’s Eve Kim, whose efforts to obtain the “permanence code” are propelled by the memory of her dead sister.
Ares is a pretty blatant attempt to perpetuate the myth that artificial intelligence is good, actually. Kim, in contrast to Dillinger, wants to use the technology’s potential to feed the hungry, help cure illnesses, and mitigate climate change. It would all be very inspiring if our current real world crop of pasty A.I. gurus weren’t singularly hellbent on wiping out lower sector jobs, depleting water reserves, and plagiarizing creatives.
But at the risk of sounding like Homer Simpson, where’s TRON? The names ENCOM and Dillinger are familiar, but Flynn is the only constant throughout all three movies, and his presence here is largely superfluous. The idea of a Grid-like cyberverse is now well-trod territory, and while it’s cool to see light cycles and Recognizers showing up on the streets of San Francisco Vancouver, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Rønning took creator Steven Lisberger’s original “aliens among us” inspiration, swapped out “aliens” for “A.I.,” and affixed a “Tron” label to it.
Your opinions about the previous movies aside (I honestly have almost no memory of Legacy), all three feature kickass soundtracks. Wendy Carlos’ original remains the gold standard, but Daft Punk was one of the only reasons to recommend Tron: Legacy. Here, Nine Inch Nails take over, and aside from the unremarkable “As Alive As You Need Me To Be,” their score absolutely propels the action in Ares.
It’s this same action that sets Ares apart from the first two, which one could charitably describe as “deliberative.” Ares ain’t that, with the Kim/Dillinger maneuvering only giving pause to the spectacle of a freeway light cycle chase or a Recognizer taking on fighter jets (piloted by NIN’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, yes really). Gillian Anderson, playing Julian’s mother Elisabeth, even gets in on the action, slapping her son when the scale of his hubris spins out of control.
I’m not even jealous, even though I’ve been longing to be slapped by Anderson for years.
As for the Leto of it all, he’s not bad, even if I can imagine his publicity tour amounting to, “Hi, I’m Jared Leto. Please go see my new movie, but don’t read my Wikipedia entry.” And if Ares is simultaneously a paragon of enlightened self-awareness while also being the baddest dude in virtual *and* physical reality, I’m sure it had nothing to do with Leto’s status as executive producer.
If you’re looking for a nuanced look at the ontological implications of artificial intelligence, I can recommend a few Substacks. Tron: Ares, on the other hand, is entertaining in the same way as an amusement park ride**. It’s loud, visually arresting, and the thrill wears off in minutes. It’s probably the least Tron of all three movies, which might be why it’s my favorite so far.
*Fun fact: Tron was disqualified from the Best Visual Effects Oscar because the Academy viewed using computers as “cheating.” **Ironically, not the the Light Cycle ride at Magic Kingdom, which sucks.
Hi, I’m Joachim Ronning. I’m the director of “Tron: Ares.” So this is the scene where Julian Dillinger has discovered that Eve is in possession of the permanence code. So he’s sending his two top programs after her, Ares and Athena. And we get to see them on the light cycles. And Ares obviously being played by Jared Leto, Athena being played by Jodie Turner-Smith and Eve being played by Greta Lee. I put so much pressure on myself and everybody to get this right, this sequence, because it’s such an iconic part of the Tron universe, the light cycle chase, and light cycles. And we spent a year designing this. And here, the police car, obviously, this is the first time we’re going to see the famous Tron light wall in the real world. And boom. We shot this in Vancouver over six weeks of nights. And luckily, Vancouver is a very film friendly city, so we were able to close down the bridge and really, really do this. And then we finally found together with Darren Gilford, the production designer, and we found a look for the light cycles and together with the suits and I’m really happy with them. This is the Akira slide by the way, which is super important for me to get in there. And I remember reading the script three years ago and thinking like, how can we be worthy of a next Tron chapter. And I think I got to page 30 or something like that. And, and I saw the digital assets coming into the real world and the light cycles coming out and creating havoc on the streets. And I felt like as a fan, as a filmmaker, that’s something I really wanted to see. So here we are getting into the parkade, and this is like, I wanted to have a sequence in the middle of this big chase that we just stopped down and we brought it all down and it became more a psychological thriller sequence. “Come on.” With Eve hiding and wondering what the hell is going on here and being resourceful, she ghost rides her Ducati and takes down Athena. And Athena Boom. Falling through the air here. That’s a real stunt woman doing that. And obviously this is in March in Vancouver. So it’s like everybody’s really cold. And it’s not easy. And we did it over so many nights. And you get that 1,000 yard stare after a while. But I’m really happy we did it. I think the audience can feel that this is real. It’s in camera. We built the light cycles, and we’re coming up to this moment now where Eve is about to make a decision and get on one. So I think the big advantages of building these assets the light cycle, we built a couple of them. What that meant was that we were able to put the camera on the light cycles with the actors. Here’s Athena coming T-1000 style, running for her. And here we go. I think this is kind of like a wish fulfillment for a lot of fans, to be able to drive the light cycle in the real world. And it sure is for me. And it was so amazing to be able to do this. And I think when you make these big movies, you have the resources to get it. And here’s Greta Lee escaping Jodie Turner-Smith or Athena actually running behind her. And you get all these things in the same shot. And both Jodie and Greta did so much running on this movie. And obviously Jodie is in that suit. So I was just so amazed by these, the physicalities that these actors went through.
When you think of the best animation studios in Hollywood, your mind likely does not go straight to Paramount Animation. Ever since the Oscar-nominated Anomalisa, this studio has found itself languishing in box office failure with Monster Trucks, Sherlock Gnomes, and Wonder Park. It’s no wonder their latest films have gone either direct to VOD or streaming on Paramount+. The Tiger’s Apprentice is the latest in the studio’s feeble attempts to make a strong impression on the genre, with wonderful intentions behind this film that get lost in the execution.
Based on Laurence Yep’s 2023 novel, this movie follows Tom Lee (Brandon Soo Hoo), a Chinese-American boy who must protect a phoenix egg. As an Asian-American person, it’s always great to see this culture represented onscreen. The protagonist looks and dresses like me. There’s a lot about this movie that I should have loved, but The Tiger’s Apprentice falters due to how familiar it feels. It’s an amalgamation of every storyline and character trope that you’ve seen in other films, with nothing unique about it besides how it explores Chinese culture. Although it’s fun to showcase Chinese people through the lens of a superhero film, there isn’t enough here to distinguish it from what you’ve seen.
There’s a lot here that feels like the most simple, traditional execution of a story. An early scene features Tom getting roughed up by a bully in school when he suddenly uses a superpower to fend him off. Soon after, he hangs out with a girl he might have a crush on. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because you already saw it in the 2002 Spider-Man movie with Tobey Maguire. The storyline afterward surrounds Tom being given an object of supreme magical power and needing to protect it from the villains who are after it. If this sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve seen it in tons of movies, including last year’s Blue Beetle.
Soon enough, Tom finds himself on an adventure with a more experienced mentor, Mr. Hu (Henry Golding). If this sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve seen it in Star Wars, The Matrix, and in perhaps the most accurate comparison, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. They butt heads, exchange some banter, and eventually form a bond. This is the type of movie that does everything you expect but with much less of the quality. Part of that is the fact that this film is a mere 83 minutes long, including credits. When you have a film that goes by that fast, you’re basically just hopping from story beat to action sequence to story beat without slowing down to breathe.
That prevents the characters from feeling as if they have complete journeys. The so-called bond that forms between Tom and Hu does not land, which is an issue because there are story beats that ask you to really care about these two. Unfortunately, they are no Miles Morales and Peter B. Parker. Furthermore, Tom’s relationship with a possible love interest never gets the treatment it deserves, with that storyline also feeling rushed and unsatisfactory. We don’t really see their relationship grow and evolve in a meaningful way either because the movie is breezing by.
Fortunately, there are a few cultural details here that are fun to see. From the characters drinking boba together to the fights, which feel inspired by both modern superhero fare and classic wuxia. There are bits of Mandarin all over this movie, and one moment that resonated with me was when the more fluent speakers jokingly corrected Tom’s pronunciation of a certain word. The stakes in The Tiger’s Apprentice feel high but vague. Before you know it, we’re in our big final battle, and it’s never a boring movie. This film can be entertaining often, but the comedy isn’t as strong as it should have been, and the drama falls short as well. There are moments that are supposed to be crowd-pleasing that end up cringe-worthy instead. To add salt to the wound, some of the voice performances can be a bit flat.
But The Tiger’s Apprentice offers a stacked cast. We have Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh as Loo. She really commits to her villainous role here. Throw in Lucy Liu, Henry Golding, Brandon Soo Hoo, Golden Globe winner Sandra Oh, Golden Globe failure Jo Koy, Sherry Cola from last year’s Joy Ride, Leah Lewis from last year’s Elemental, Greta Lee from last year’s Past Lives, and more. It seems like the only Asians missing from this cast are Awkwafina and Randall Park. Most of the performances in this ensemble are fine, but there isn’t always much on the page. The film introduces the idea of having a group of characters who exist as the 12 zodiac animals. It’s not dissimilar to the Spider-People from the Spider-Verse series, but it doesn’t work as well here because the characters generally don’t feel distinct, nor are they particularly funny.
All in all, The Tiger’s Apprentice is a predictable movie that never packs the punch it should have, even if it offers middling entertainment in its animated superhero action sequences.
SCORE: 5/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 5 equates to “Mediocre.” The positives and negatives wind up negating each other, making it a wash.
Disclosure: ComingSoon received a screener for our The Tiger’s Apprentice review.
“Jumping the shark” is bound to happen on any TV series if it goes on long enough. And maybe, after a mere three seasons, The Morning Show has exhibited itself to have done just that. Even if it took Jennifer Aniston’s “other” major show, Friends, slightly longer. Arguably not until season eight, when the writers decided to drag out Ross (David Schwimmer) and Rachel’s (Aniston) “will they or won’t they get together?” plotline by throwing Joey (Matt LeBlanc) as yet another wrench into the mix to delay the inevitable. The worst, most ill-conceived one yet. In season three of The Morning Show, Paul Marks a.k.a. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is that wrench delaying the inevitable. In this instance, that UBA is doomed to shutter after its endless sputter.
Although, initially, it felt as though the addition of Hamm (whose last name couldn’t be more ideal for an actor) as an Elon Musk-esque billionaire (minus the autism) would be a welcome “shake-up” to The Morning Show, things took a quick nosedive after the episode wherein a chasm in the TV space-time continuum occurred by way of Rachel Green fucking Don Draper. With four episodes left to go after that happened in “The Stanford Student,” it didn’t take long for the season to devolve quite quickly, with Alex Levy (Aniston) turning into the tone deaf, blinded-by-peen, villainous white woman to complement Paul Marks as a villainous white man. In fact, the suspension of disbelief viewers must invoke in order to believe that someone as “smart” and “shrewd” as Alex would go for Paul just because of the supposed “Hepburn-Tracy” dynamic they have at first is all but impossible to maintain for much longer after the seventh episode, “Strict Scrutiny.” The latter immediately commences with some cringeworthy moments between the two, complete with Paul making her a frittata for breakfast (as if even the most romantic of billionaires would ever) and Alex already looking upon this gesture as a reason to fall in total love with the man who has a nefarious reputation. One that leads the latest TMS co-anchor, Chris Jackson (Nicole Beharie), to casually mention to Alex while they’re both in the makeup chair, “There are studies that show power…it actually changes the brain. It erases the ability to empathize. It makes me wonder: what does Paul Marks really care about?”
Why, amassing more power of course. And how does one do that by any other method but quashing all opposition to his money-making potential? For money is power in this thing called “life,” alternately known as capitalism (hadn’t you heard? Capitalism is life). Alex, too moneyed for too long to remember that there are actually people—nay, men—like Paul who still care about racking up a higher and higher “worth,” has always been more concerned with prestige and respect rather than the money that comes with it. What’s more, Alex, in contrast to Paul, only seems to care about racking up her previously low orgasm count (at least as given by another human being). Hence, being irritated rather than taking it to heart when her former morning co-anchor, Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), tells her that Paul is not only bad news just because, duh, he’s a billionaire, but because she’s been doing some digging and everything she turns up points to something very shady going on at his company, Hyperion. The one that’s supposed to launch a SpaceX-inspired rocket. And does a test version of that in episode one, “The Kármán Line,” on live TV. Except that Paul’s big morning show moment is dampened by the transmission being cut, followed by a massive cyberattack on all of UBA’s servers. These major plot points ultimately being intertwined, as the big season three reveal in the final episode, “The Overview Effect,” is that Paul was the mastermind behind the hack all along, not to mention a master in the art of surveillance that rivals J. Edgar Hoover-level scope. All of which is to say that, yes, Jennifer Aniston was starring in her own version of Sleeping With the Enemy. Indeed, the ick factor noticeably increases when one stops to think about how the “attraction” between her and Paul was likely entirely manufactured on Paul’s side of things. The greatest sign of that being that billionaires rarely, if ever, date age-appropriate women.
After their “union” is exposed by The Vault, the same online rag that outed Bradley, the better part of the season is then spent showing Alex being branded as a hypocrite with an apparent flavor for shitty men (see also: Mitch Kessler [Steve Carrell]). As Alex deals with all of the fallout for the unwanted public consumption of their relationship, UBA continues to focus its news coverage on the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. And, considering the double standard Alex faces for being in a relationship with Paul, it’s a timely parallel to the form of gross sexism she’s experiencing. Even from her “own kind.” Namely, the interview subject Chip (Mark Duplass) talks her into for Alex Unfiltered, Jess Bennett (Shannon Woodward), a co-founder of an online magazine called The Break.
Rather than focusing on women’s rights, as was the plan for their interview, Jess keeps bringing up Alex’s strange bedfellow, finally asking, “If a reporter hooks up with a billionaire who is buying her media company, people are going to ask questions. Like, ‘Is she actually capable of speaking truth to power?’” Alex, in the end, tries to prove that she still can…by giving up her precious dick in favor of doing “the right thing.” Or, more accurately, yet another desperate thing: merging with fellow “legacy media” network NBN. But hey, that’s still better than selling it to a man who plans to dismantle the whole outfit for “parts” (in a move that echoes Lukas Matsson’s [Alexander Skarsgård] on Succession) so he can make a quick few billion to pump back into his fledgling wannabe SpaceX company.
Despite knowing all this—that Paul was responsible for the hack, spied on and egregiously violated Bradley’s privacy, silenced multiple Hyperion employees, was willing to endanger people’s lives to promote his own bottom line, etc., etc.—she still manages to shed a few tears in the final scene they share together. And, after he walks away, watching Alex for almost fifteen seconds as the camera offers a close-up of her paltry tears and scrunched-up (or as scrunched-up as the fillers will allow) face, the absurdity of it all is accented when the camera shifts to a wide shot of her standing on her massive balcony with its unheard of skyline view. In other words, poor little rich girl—she lost her poor little rich boy.
In the scene that follows, she appears to have mended quickly, escorting Bradley to the FBI building so she can confess to her obstruction of justice (another “okay, what the fuck?” plotline being her brother’s involvement with January 6th) while saying that she’s not so sure about how to continue in the new UBA (/UBANBN) era without Bradley. But Bradley is there to comfort her by insisting she really will have a voice in the new company this time. Alex ominously returns, “Be careful what you fight for.” This apparently setting things up for season four, aimed at exploring what it “really means” for a woman to have power. If Margaret Thatcher was an indication, it means they end up being no better than men (harkening back to what Chris said about power altering people’s brain chemistry).
Whatever the “message” of season four might be, season three’s was, despite being occasionally all over the place, mostly on-brand with the current ongoing hate campaign against the rich. Yet that doesn’t necessarily make for the most “stellar” of television just because the themes presented are “correct.” And, although the name of The Morning Show’s game from the beginning has been to “incorporate timely things” into its narrative framework, doing so in season three has caused a more jumping the shark effect than a “pause for reflection” one. Something that doesn’t necessarily bode well for the future of the series…however many subsequent seasons there might be.
“Hi, my name is Celine Song, and I’m the writer and director of ‘Past Lives.’” [MUSIC PLAYING] “So the scene is between Hae Sung, who’s played by Teo Yoo, and Nora, who is played by Greta Lee, and it’s about these two characters who haven’t seen each other in person in 24 years. And they’re sort of reuniting in New York. And the focus of the scene is about the way that Hae Sung looks so lost and alone and very small in New York City, in the city that is foreign to him. It’s a city that he’s here as a tourist. And the thing that we’re, of course, trying to capture here, is a kind of sense of anxiety and excitement. It’s some kind of a mix of both of waiting for your old friend that you haven’t seen in a long time. And he doesn’t know what to expect. And we wanted him to look like a kid in the scene. You know, him as he’s touching his hair to fix it, because he just wants to leave a good impression. And we’re really talking about capturing this moment where Nora is going to shout his name and he’s going to turn. And this whole shot was set up for this turn.” [CAR HORNS] “Hae Sung!” “And then we get to actually experience his sort of stunnedness or awe as he is seeing Nora. And the way that I sort of wrote this in the script, is that it’s as though he is seeing a ghost, and she’s also seeing a ghost. They’re sort of seeing a ghost in each other. And not only is this ghost, a real person who’s physical, she’s also walking towards him. And it’s meant to be a little bit terrifying.” [FOOTSTEPS] – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] “So this is the moment in the past for them where they were childhood sweethearts. And I think for that moment, that viscerally, you’re sort of transported back in time. And Nora here is sort of breaking the barrier between them and crossing over. And the sound design for this is also about New York crashing down on them as she reaches over to hug him.” [TRAFFIC] [CAR HORNS] “There’s very little dialogue in the scene. So, so much of it had to happen through the way that they’re living with this moment and trying to navigate how they feel. And this particular shot is something that me and my DP, Shabier Kirchner, were sort of pulling from a Kore-eda trick, which is what we call the swinging camera. Where here, we’re with Hae Sung, and we’re so happy to see him and we’re excited to experience this through him, but we miss Nora. So, the camera moves so that we can see Nora.” – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [MUSIC PLAYING] “And now we’re so happy to see Nora and we’re just happy to experience this moment with her. And, but we’re happy to be here, but we also start to miss Hae Sung, so there’s a little bit of longing that gets built. And then we move over and we see Hae Sung again. And we’re so happy to see Hae Sung. And I think that feeling is really the thing that we were after for what we wanted this to be. Because now we’re going to miss Hae Sung again, and we’re so happy to see Nora. And this is the kind of emotional state that we want to put the audience, of longing and also glad to see someone, which is sort of what the heart of the scene is. And of course, they’re so happy, and we sort of walk them out of the scene.” – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [LAUGHS]
