Review: Tron: Ares (2025)
In summer 2023, I urged filmgoers to revisit the Tron movies, which seemed as relevant then as ever, and not just because Generative AI was sweeping over industry, education, and cultural production. Clearly, Disney noticed the same thing. How else to explain Disney turning the power back on for its computer geek sci-fi series? Tron: Ares comes 15 years after Joseph Kosinski’s slick sequel, Tron: Legacy (2010), and 43 years after Steven Lisberger’s strange original Tron (1982). Directed by Joachim Rønning, who is the veteran of an indie hit (2012’s Kon Tiki) and a couple franchise sequels for Disney (2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and 2019’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil), Tron: Ares delivers a decent if conventional action-adventure. But the film truly succeeds as a sensory experience.
More than any other mainstream blockbuster I’ve reviewed this year, Tron: Ares is worth seeing on an IMAX screen. The film’s visual design is stunning—obsessed with slick black surfaces and neon curves, racing bikes and slow-motion combat. And with a propulsive electronic soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails (with Oscar-winner Trent Reznor building on Daft Punk’s great work for Tron: Legacy), the film’s audio—both music score and sound design—might be its most impressive feature.
The main problems with Tron: Ares are matters of conception, not execution. The story, by David DiGilio and Jesse Wigutow, has the idea of bringing characters and objects from the digital Tron world into ours, via little-explained lasers that operate like advanced 3D printers, constructing anything digitally imagined from scratch. (Oddly, we never see material being shaped by the lasers; instead, the lasers seem to generate the matter.) It is true that the story seems to build on suggestions in the earlier films. In the original Tron, human characters go in and out of the digital world via a laser device. Tron: Legacy suggests that the digital world can be materialized in the physical world, with the evil Clu about to lead his program army into the real world to conquer it. It is also a standard approach in Hollywood sequels to simply reverse an aspect of the previous movie(s): so if we entered the digital world in the first two Tron movies, Tron: Ares will advance the narrative by bringing the digital into our world.
But at the end of the day, what we care about in the Tron movies is the digital world. The strange world behind the computer screen set out in the original Tron is captivating, like an imaginative child’s daydream. Tron: Legacy expands and explores that digital world in intriguing ways. The series’ human world of tech heroes and villains, who once again are oddly pitched somewhere between video game designers, software engineers, and corporate titans, is the lesser storyline—even if it is the storyline that connects to our current reality.
In the film, Greta Lee’s Eve Kim is the current CEO of ENCOM, the company Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn built in the previous movies. Through photos and other digital memories that serve as flashbacks, we learn that Eve’s sister, and co-CEO, died of cancer. That trauma provides the script’s only real motivation for Kim. (The contemporary penchant to have protagonists’ motivated by trauma is getting really stale.) Lee, who was great in Past Lives (2023), might not jump out at you as an action heroine, but she is surprisingly capable of playing the CEO as well as riding motor bikes and Light Cycles. That said, Kim lacks the genial charisma of Bridge’s Flynn, or the edge of Garrett’s Hedlund’s Sam. In spite of Lee’s efforts, the character is flatly written.
Meanwhile, the rival CEO of Dillinger Systems, Evan Williams’ Julian Dillinger, develops the titular Ares, an advanced security program (played by the film’s star, Jared Leto). Both CEOs are also simultaneously chasing the “Permanence Code.” Early on, the film explains that any digital-to-material creations rapidly expire, falling in a heap of digital ashes after 29 minutes. What’s strange is that the film assumes the digital-materialization laser technology and then uses the Permanence Code as the MacGuffin, the object the main characters must pursue. I guess I just found it strange that we don’t really see any of the characters' efforts to develop or attain the materialization technology. In late sequels of this sort, there’s always the question of how to reintroduce the world and where to start the story, and I don’t think this film’s opening montage of news clips to catch us up does the narrative any favours.
The third main character, Jared Leto’s Ares, is also motivated to obtain the Permanence Code. In many respects, Ares is an antihero version of the character Tron (played by Bruce Boxleitner in the original film). Ares becomes self-aware, seemingly through his advanced programming as well as the experience of entering our human world. Fortunately, the grafting of the Ares character onto the MacGuffin plot improves the narrative as the film progresses, for we sympathize with Ares’ motivation to become real more than we do the two CEOs’ ambitions, anxieties, and family drama. Many folks think Leto can’t carry a franchise, and that might very well be the case, but his stilted way of talking and intense eyes actually make him a good actor to play a computer program come alive.
While the filmmakers’ studious effort to avoid any romance between Kim and Ares is very much in line with Disney’s current cultural agenda, the lack of romance also means that we are missing yet another set of conventional character motivations to support the narrative.
Thus, Tron: Ares is unable to cast an effective hook until it latches onto Ares’ self-discovery and quest to become real. But the Ares plotline is also an assemblage of sci-fi tropes. A line of dialogue spoken late in the movie, directed at Ares to mock him, saying he’s like Pinocchio wanting to become a real boy, actually clarifies Ares’ story for the audience. The same could be said about Ares’ affinity for a quote from Frankenstein’s Monster (“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful”). These pieces from other works do too much of the heavy lifting to explain the character in the script. We see this again with Ares’ mystical experience in reaction to rain falling, which will of course remind cinephiles of the “Tears in Rain” monologue from the end of Blade Runner, when the dying replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) mourns the oblivion of his memories. While nothing in the Ares plot rivals the power of Batty describing “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,” it still cuts deeper than the rest of the movie.
At the same time, the themes that emerge from Ares’ quest have a certain vagueness and emphasis on feeling—perhaps the reflection of our culture’s meaning crisis, latching onto vibes and feelings in the face of a void. Ares’ climactic dialogue with the digital ghost of Flynn (like a digital version of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Force Ghost), satisfies but never impresses. I chuckled when Ares said that in the end he prefers Depeche Mode to Mozart, and I appreciate the gesture towards the ultimate undefinability of significance and meaning, which sets it apart from the preciseness of computer code. But even here, at its thematic best, the film is a replication of wisdom spoken somewhere else.
I’ve spent a lot of this review talking about the mediocre characters and replicated themes, but Tron: Ares is at its best when we just sit back, stop thinking, and get swept up. The standout action sequence comes when Dillinger activates Ares and the minion, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), and sends them into the real world (the unnamed West Coast City) to kidnap Kim. She flees on her motorbike (remember, in this world all tech CEOs are extreme sports enthusiasts), and Ares and Athena pursue her on their Light Cycles. It is wonderful to see the Light Cycles outside of the Grid stadium in the Tron world, and to watch the solidified beams of red neon light they leave in their tracks as they race down busy freeways and darkly lit city streets. Mix in closeups of the actors’ faces on their bikes, lending a sense of immediacy, and underline the action with solid electro beats, and we have an exhilarating ride. The film’s climax, another standout visual and audio sequence, features drones that can leave similarly solidified beams in the sky. Two fighter jets must navigate the beams as they try to deal with the approaching, massive three-line Recognizer airship. Strangely, and more than any of the dramatic moments in the movie, these audio-visual action sequences invite us to be mindful, to observe the scenes like dances.
I asked in 2023 if Tron: Legacy is the first “legacy sequel,” meaning those late sequels from over the past decade or two that sought to both continue franchises and reboot them, to stay the same yet do something different. As with summer 2025’s Jurassic World: Rebirth, there is a different feel to these franchise sequels right now. There is less anxious self-reflection in the films, but they are still made up of the pieces of other movies and texts. Like so much else in 2025, Tron: Ares is still assembled from the gleanings of earlier cultural harvests.
When I weigh and measure Tron: Ares, I find there are not enough moments of substance beneath the many references and the genuinely incredible sensory experience. It’s been a few days since I watched Tron: Ares, so it has outlived the 29-minute barrier in my mind, but I don’t think this sequel will achieve the Permanence Code.
6 out of 10
Tron: Ares (2025, USA)
Directed by Joachim Rønning; screenplay by Jesse Wigutow, and story by David DiGilio and Jesse Wigutow; starring Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner‑Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson, and Jeff Bridges.
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