When you sit back and take them all in together, the Tron movies aren’t a cohesive series so much as they’re like a set of artifacts about the gradual demise of technological optimism. That initial 1982 feature, in all its Day-Glo eight-bit glory, was about a battle over authorship — the triumph of a visionary coder over the less talented C-suite member who stole his work. That it also happened to be about a program that developed self-awareness was secondary to renegade software engineer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) being transported inside a computer system and literally beating VP Ed Dillinger (David Warner) at his own game. By the 2010 follow-up Tron: Legacy, Kevin had transformed into a sage trapped in cyberspace, a remnant of the hippie-techie intersection out of which Silicon Valley culture sprung. His Zen talk now masked his indecision, and he’d been supplanted by an unsettling, de-aged digital doppelgänger hellbent on a campaign of conquest and the Tron equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

And now we have Tron: Ares, in which there are two CEOs battling it out for the soul of humanity; the one who charges ahead with the development of artificial intelligence while hoping the result will turn out to be benevolent is the good CEO. That’s as upbeat a vision of what’s to come as we can ask for, I guess: Acceptance of AI is mandatory, but if we’re lucky, it will like us — and by the way, it’s going to look like Jared Leto. The actor plays Ares, an advanced security program created by Julian Dillinger (a pallid Evan Peters), a tatted-up nihilist who’s inherited control of his grandfather Ed’s company from his steely mother, Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson, the only one having fun). In the world of Tron: Ares, directed by Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Rønning, Dillinger Systems is in a desperate race with Flynn’s ENCOM to dominate the AI industry, and there’s something grimly appropriate about the future of humanity being in the hands of either a defense contractor or a video-game company.

Kevin’s son, Sam, the protagonist of Tron: Legacy played by Garrett Hedlund, gets ushered out of the franchise in the introduction: The head of ENCOM is now Eve Kim (Greta Lee, adrift), an intensely focused idealist who rides a motorcycle, appears on a lot of magazine covers, and at the start of the film vanishes off the grid into the Alaskan wilderness for three months to finish up a project started by her late sister. Both Dillinger and ENCOM are focused on perfecting a technique by which they use particle lasers to 3-D print anything, including seemingly living organisms, that they’ve modeled in a digital space. You’d think they’d be more impressed by overcoming one of the basic laws of physics (one of Eve’s colleagues, Arturo Castro, has a jokey line about how incredible it is that the lasers are able to make organic material out of nothing), but they’re both stuck on the fact that everything they laser into existence disintegrates after 29 minutes. This includes physical versions of Ares and his lieutenant, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), whom Julian summons into the real world for carefully timed demos for military funders.

Both Eve and Julian are searching for what they called the “permanence code,” a way to keep their digital creations from crumbling into dust at the half-hour mark. Eve’s sister was convinced that Kevin had discovered the answer, which also might be a way of turning programs into real boys (and girls). But all of this is confusing sci-fi hokum — the real reason most people are going to come to Tron: Ares are the set pieces, the chases on light bikes, and the fights with the throwing discs all the digital characters have on their backs. Rønning has become one of Disney’s go-to guys, having done a Pirates of the Caribbean, a Maleficent, and Young Woman and the Sea, but he’s no Joseph Kosinski, who made Tron: Legacy into a retro-futuristic rave full of smirking gynoids stalking on built-in heels, sculptural translucent battle arenas, and Daft Punk on the soundtrack and playing themselves in a nightclub scene. Rønning does get his own kick-ass score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, all ominous throbbing, but can’t come up with anything visually distinctive. He imports the streaks-of-colored-light showdowns from the digital grid onto the paved roads of a real city, but that turns out to be far less cool looking than dumping a human into an alien, computerized world. The best sequence in the film is one that harkens back to the 1982 original and features no action at all.

Mostly, when you watch Tron: Ares, you become aware of the degree to which this franchise has exhausted its own metaphor. Programs, in that first movie, were reflections of their creators, lines of code that happen to look exactly like the humans who wrote them for the sake of narrative drama. Four-plus decades on, we’re dealing with real crises over LLMs because we can’t help but project ourselves onto our own digital works, surrendering to corporate fatalism about how this technology must be embraced and insisting that something like ChatGPT must be capable of feelings simply because it has been created to mirror us and provoke us into engagement however possible. Tron: Ares has foundered onto recent developments it is by no means capable of contending with. Its best moments are when it acknowledges that it’s silly, as when Ares talks about his love of Depeche Mode in a monologue that’s incredibly Patrick Bateman–esque (Leto is convincingly robotic and becomes more and more off-putting as he becomes self-aware and lightly flirty). But the rest of the movie is straight-faced, as though its story of two reckless sociopaths vying to destroy the world in their respective modes weren’t appallingly depressing.

In all of the Trons, there’s a divide between users and programs and no interest in actually exploring what sentience might look like if it weren’t just a reflection of humanity. Like parents wondering if their children would also consider them friends, the franchise’s central consideration is whether the programs would have an affinity for us if given a choice. Tron: Ares dares to say that it doesn’t matter because AI is going to take over anyway, no matter the cost, and we’re just going to have to accept it and see what happens.

 Tron: Ares’s vision of what’s to come is as upbeat as we can ask for, I guess.