Tron: Ares has arrived at what should be a perfect moment. Any cursory doomscroll across all social media feeds of the last year are filled with speculation on artificial intelligence and its future, something which Ares’ script does capitalize on for mere moments at a time. Once an obligatory recap of the previous two entries released across a span of 43 years concludes, Tron: Ares quickly gets to its only real interests: Action scenes to show off dazzling computer generated effects, and blasting a phenomenal score by Nine Inch Nails. To quote one of the most famous synthetic characters in all of film history, all other priorities are rescinded.
Half of this gamble isn’t so absurd on paper. The original Tron from 1982 featured otherworldly music from synthesizer pioneer Wendy Carlos, and Tron: Legacy ushered in an iconic collaboration between composer Hans Zimmer and the legendary techno duo Daft Punk. While this franchise has been defined in a large part by its place in digital effects history, the one unequivocally great part of the newest entry is the music by Nine Inch Nails. The other half of the gamble is where Tron: Ares starts to fall apart, and that’s a major problem for a film with a story as thin as this. The previous Tron films have been able to surf on a wave of immaculate vibes brought forward by synesthesia achieved through a perfect melding between their visuals and their music. Ares sinks beneath the same wave.
Fifteen years after the events of Tron: Legacy, the world watches as two major software companies are locked in a race to secure the future. One is ENCOM, founded by Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) who disappeared in 1989 under mysterious circumstances. ENCOM is currently led by Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who desperately misses her sister who passed away. The other is Dillinger Systems, led by Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the son of Elisabeth Dillinger (Gillian Anderson) and the grandson of Ed Dillinger from the 1982 original film. Both ENCOM and Dillinger Systems are trying to bring digital objects from the virtual world, “The Grid,” into the real-world. The only problem is that these digital objects only last 29 minutes, and both companies believe that Kevin Flynn may have found something called “the permanence code,” which would stabilize these objects.
The major difference between ENCOM and Dillinger Systems is that the former wishes to use this technology to create crops in climate-damaged environments, cure diseases, and better mankind, and the latter is pioneering the creation of military hardware. Dillinger Systems’ prized creation is the software Ares (Jared Leto) and his subordinate software Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith). Julian Dillinger recklessly unleashes Ares and Athena into the real-world to try and steal the permanence code from Eve Kim, but Ares begins to malfunction, questioning his own existence and seeking to find out what it means to be truly alive.
There’s an impressive roster of actors here, including two prominent supporting parts from Arturo Castro and Hasan Minhaj, but the quality of the performances is all over the place. The best performer here is Jodie Turner-Smith as Athena, doing her best to channel the likes of Robert Patrick in T2 and wildly succeeding. Greta Lee does the best she can with Eve Kim, but like almost every character in the film, she’s thinly drawn out by the screenplay. Gillian Anderson manages to be a neutral presence within the film, but arguably two of the most important actors in Tron: Ares are both lacking.
Evan Peters is trying to channel the energy of obnoxious modern Silicon Valley tech bros, but only conjures the annoying parts of those personas. To be fair to Peters, the screenplay doesn’t do his character a single favor, painting him in the broadest moral strokes usually reserved for Saturday morning cartoons of the era the original Tron was released in. The only reason he doesn’t have a mustache to twirl is that it wouldn’t fit the look of the Silicon Valley tech bro this movie is desperately gesturing at.
By far the biggest swing and miss is Jared Leto as Ares. In the early parts of the film where Ares is a cold intelligence, Leto works extremely well. The performance collapses in on itself the minute that Ares becomes friendlier, especially when Ares starts quipping throughout the entire second half of the movie. A handful of these quips land, but most of them are eyeroll inducing. Characters within the film wear protective eyewear when lasers are used to bring virtual objects into the real world; I’d recommend similar precautions in the form of earplugs to pop in whenever Leto opens up his mouth.
Leto’s sudden shift in performance is not entirely his fault. In fact, most of the jankiness in the performances come from the screenplay desperately sprinting to the next action set piece with no time to breathe. This is an understandable instinct for a major blockbuster, but there needed to be far more time spent letting these characters meaningfully reflect on their changing natures. The script squeezes in two sequences that allow for this, but each of them comes too late in the movie and neither are written particularly well. The latter of these two sequences is connected to another glaring problem with Tron: Ares, its nostalgic pandering.
Nostalgic pandering was a problem with this film’s predecessor, Tron Legacy, but the way Tron: Ares crowbars in an extended reference to the original film is one of the most puzzling decisions I’ve seen any movie make in 2025. Ares enters The Grid as shown in the 1982 film, and it might have been kind of cool if Ares didn’t immediately look around and start saying things like “Classic” or “I love the 80s.” It is the undisputed lowpoint of Tron: Ares, one which gets lower once a headscratching mid-credits scene hits that will only make sense if you’re familiar with the original film.
However, there are merits to Tron: Ares. The action sequences where programs enter the real-world are absolutely gorgeous. It is clear that all of the film’s visual imagination went into crafting these sequences, shot in actual physical locations instead of backlots to draw even more attention to the sharp contrast of gritty reality and neon-reds that highlight the virtual constructs. The grittier parts of the aesthetic assuredly come from veteran cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, one of David Fincher’s frequent collaborators. These sequences also lean into one of the film’s other great strengths of staging incredible vehicle chases. Tron: Ares smartly capitalizes on this strength for the grand majority of its action scenes, but that’s also because the other part of its action isn’t nearly as good, its sloppily shot hand-to-hand combat. There are some fight scenes that should be spectacular, but they are only legible when the film uses slow-motion to break up horrifically choppy editing.
The most baffling part of Tron: Ares is a direct opposite to its greatest strength, which are the aesthetics of The Grid. Where the digital constructs entering our world feels as bold as the visual apexes achieved by previous entries, the digital world has never looked blander. This is the point where the biggest elephant in the room with Tron: Ares has to be addressed, which is the fact that Tron: Legacy’s director, Joseph Kosinski, did not return to make this film. Kosinski has been replaced by Joachim Rønning, who simply does not possess the vision of his predecessor. What Kosinski achieved with Tron: Legacy’s aesthetics was a massive feat, a total reinvention of a visual style that, in the wrong hands, could have alienated fans of the 1982 original. Instead, Kosinski’s vision was so strong and such a smart evolution of what came before that it was immediately embraced and still stands as one of the best-looking blockbusters of the 2010s.
At the risk of sounding particularly cruel, it turns out the man who has gone on to direct Top Gun: Maverick and F1: The Movie is a more interesting director than the guy whose first solo theatrical directing credit is for Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. Joachim Rønning’s vision of The Grid is flatly lit and boring. A sequence early in the film that depicts Dillinger Systems’ programs hacking into ENCOM is the least interesting The Grid has ever looked across the past 43 years this franchise has existed. The sequence is also the first time Tron: Ares’ aforementioned sloppy hand-to-hand combat rears its head. When compared to the first time you see The Grid in Tron: Legacy, it is literally night and day.
Tron: Ares sounds a lot worse than what’s written down here, but only because it is an expensive blockbuster film. There is a baseline of competency you can see in just about any movie produced by a major corporation, especially one designed to mine pre-existing intellectual property from a catalog. Tron: Ares is mostly serviceable, but the glimpses of exceptional visuals in parts and the constant thumping of the excellent Nine Inch Nails score serve as a reminder that the film should be better than it is.
There is a bitter irony in making a movie about a piece of software that wishes to evolve only to make a movie that’s mostly taking steps backwards from what came before. A scene sees Ares sorting through files and coming across a quote from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” If only Tron: Ares was as fearless as Frankenstein’s creation.
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