No franchise in Disney’s deep corporate Rolodex is more odd and misshapen than Tron. The original 1982 film was for years a pop-culture bookend: The tale of a video-game developer who gets zapped into his own software, it was the first movie to significantly use CGI in its production. As visually groundbreaking as it was, Tron is also narratively puzzling—built on an internal logic of digital life that required lots of exposition. It was a box-office disappointment, seemingly destined to be a footnote in cinematic history. Somehow, two sequels have materialized to update the swooshing neon visuals and cartoony renditions of a virtual world. The latest attempt is Tron: Ares, which, as dazzling as it often is, features one of the more rock-brained screenplays I’ve ever encountered. It’s another superficial, techno-futuristic tale that emphasizes its glossy look over its heady concept.Each Tron movie (the other is 2010’s gorgeously convoluted Tron: Legacy) shares this epic mismatch of enchanting imagery and muddled storytelling. Ares does make a heroic effort to refer back to the two prior films: 15 years after Legacy, sentient computer programs now run amok on metropolitan streets, unleashed from their digital compound. In some ways, Ares feels responsive to real-life headlines that are consumed with whatever staggering technological leap that machine intelligence might make next—though the movie doesn’t have much of a take on AI beyond “It would be nice if it were good, and not bad.” Still, at least there are a lot of oversize-glow-stick fights along the way.Compared with its predecessors, Ares can seem grounded. The first Tron focuses on Kevin Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges), who gets teleported inside his own arcade games; he meets his programs, who are anthropomorphized and wearing colorful armor (blue for good, red for bad). In Legacy, Flynn gets lost within a version of cyberspace called The Grid; his son logs on to chase after him. Ares is much more concerned with tangible matters. Flynn’s company is now in the hands of a new CEO, Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who has become obsessed with an invention of Flynn’s called the “permanence code.” The file, now missing, would somehow make it possible to turn lines of code into a concrete substance, be it a fruit tree, a life-saving medicine, or a flesh-and-blood personification of a program.[Read: Our AI fears run long and deep]Worried about the essential laws of physics? Questioning how any computer can just beam some lasers onto the ground and 3-D-print an entire human being? Well, then you’re watching the wrong movie. This is a series that has always operated as absurd speculation, where broad metaphors about life and science get posited amid techno beats and car chases. Ares plays with the notion of software developing a sense of self—but it largely still treats AI’s potential as sci-fi nonsense, rather than as a topic that has prompted congressional debate. In the film, the worrisome program is called Ares (Jared Leto); it’s an advanced creation that Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters, appearing as the grandson of Tron’s original villain) uses to wage war on Eve, his business rival. Julian dispatches Ares and his deputy, Athena (an imperious Jodie Turner-Smith), to the physical world, ordering them to shake down Eve for information about Flynn’s code. The pair have to work against the clock: After 29 minutes, their code degrades, and they return to the mainframe. (Again: Please dispense with any actual scientific thought on how this might work.)There’s a lot of flitting between the material and cyber realms, undercutting one of Tron’s primary appeals: basking in the strangeness of what life looks like inside of a computer. Ares instead collapses the two, transporting technology from the other universe—like the light cycle, a futuristic motorcycle that’s become a franchise icon—onto real-world streets. These crossovers can be thrilling, but they also reinforce how much more visually inspired the world of code is than its earthly counterpart. As such, I felt a little shortchanged every time I had to see human beings arguing in a conference room instead. Still, I can’t deny that the film’s director, Joachim Rønning (a Disney mainstay who has made sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean and Maleficent), does provide plenty of primary-colored glowing rings and vehicles to look at, and a thrumming, head-crunching score from Nine Inch Nails keeps the vibes relatively immaculate.Perhaps the film’s biggest issue, however, is its protagonist. Leto is a total charisma vacuum as Ares—forgivable when the character is portrayed as a brutal, unthinking machine, but less so when he starts to develop morality and self-awareness. As its titular figure, Ares should be the movie’s focus. Yet Leto never shakes the role’s robotic nature, even as his character strives to become more human, and his acting partners struggle to play off that in a meaningful way. The goofy charm that Bridges brings to the prior films is greatly lacking here, replaced with mordant self-seriousness. The audience is left with a wheel-spinning story about an anthropomorphized AI finding itself—and a slew of unanswered questions about the radical science on display.