Disney’s decades-long struggle to transform Tron into a viable franchise has been, to put it mildly, a perplexing endeavor. The original 1982 film was considered groundbreaking for its time, a pioneering work of visual effects that pushed the boundaries of what cinema could achieve. Its 2010 sequel, Tron: Legacy, arrived with Joseph Kosinski’s sleek visual style and an unforgettable score by Daft Punk that remains one of the all-time great soundtracks — even if the film itself was hamstrung by awkward de-aging technology and a story that never quite justified its existence. Between these two theatrical releases, Disney attempted an animated series for DisneyXD (cancelled after one season) and a live-action series for Disney+ that never escaped development hell. The studio’s determination to make Tron happen borders on admirable, if only it weren’t so transparently desperate.
Which brings us to Tron: Ares, arriving a full 15 years after Legacy with Norwegian director Joachim Rønning at the helm. I hoped that Disney might leverage this property to explore something meaningful about our current moment, particularly given our cultural fixation on artificial intelligence and its ramifications. Instead, what Ares delivers is a surface-level meditation on AI that feels less interested in grappling with uncomfortable realities than checking boxes on a corporate mandate.
The setup inverts the premise of previous films: rather than humans entering the digital Grid, advanced programs can now be materialized into the real world using particle lasers and some hand-wavy physics. The catch is that these creations — whether weapons, vehicles, or humanoid programs — disintegrate into dust after precisely 29 minutes. Two tech companies are racing to discover the “permanence code” that will allow these digital beings to exist indefinitely. Eve Kim (Greta Lee), the idealistic CEO of ENCOM, wants to use this technology to combat environmental devastation and global poverty. Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the bratty grandson of the original film’s villain and current head of Dillinger Systems, has more sinister ambitions involving militarized AI soldiers.
At the center of this corporate arms race is Ares (Jared Leto), an advanced security program designed by Dillinger who begins developing something resembling sentience and a longing to experience life beyond the Grid. It’s a premise liberally recycled from countless other stories, and the film even acknowledges as much when Julian explicitly name-drops a Pinocchio comparison (see also: Short Circuit or The Iron Giant). What Ares fails to do is justify why we need another iteration of this familiar narrative, or what fresh perspective it might bring to well-trodden thematic territory.
The most frustrating aspect of Tron: Ares is how it squanders a genuinely timely opportunity. We’re living through a period of legitimate anxiety about artificial intelligence: its resource consumption, its implications for creative labor and copyright, its potential for manipulation and misinformation, and concerns far more nefarious than any explored here. The film gestures vaguely in the direction of these issues but never commits to examining them with any depth or nuance. Instead, we get a reductive framework of cartoonishly benevolent CEO versus cartoonishly evil CEO, both competing in an AI race that feels disconnected from how this technology actually functions in reality.
Credit where it’s due: there’s some genuinely solid craftsmanship on display here. The visual effects are competent throughout, and when digital beings and weapons manifest in the real world, the results can be quite striking. A lightcycle chase through city streets makes for a genuinely thrilling action setpiece, and there’s a charming sequence where Ares enters the original Grid from Flynn’s Arcade — seeing those retro ’80s designs recreated with modern polish made for a fun throwback.
The artistry also extends to the film’s audible offerings. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (credited here as Nine Inch Nails) have delivered a soundtrack that stands as the film’s unambiguous highlight. As a longtime devotee of Reznor (I was fortunate enough to catch NIN live in Berlin earlier this year), I have nothing but praise for what they’ve accomplished — the score is visceral, propulsive, and at times almost oppressive in its intensity. It’s a worthy successor to Daft Punk’s iconic work on Legacy, and frankly deserves a better film wrapped around it.
Alas, solid technical craft can only carry a film so far when the story is this bland and the performances this uninspired. Jared Leto’s work as Ares is the equivalent of a charisma vacuum; his stilted, one-note approach to playing an AI developing sentience is so yawn-inducing that you could replace him with virtually any other handsome actor and nothing of consequence would be lost. The role demands someone capable of conveying subtle layers of emergent emotion, a performer who could find the humanity in an artificial being through behavioral specificity and genuine warmth. Instead, Leto stares blank-faced through most of the runtime, delivering lines with all the passion of a customer service chatbot. Even his attempt at expressing newfound appreciation for human culture — a monologue about preferring Depeche Mode to Mozart — lands with a thud.
The supporting cast fares only marginally better, largely because they’re working with severely underwritten material. Evan Peters does serviceable work approximating the whiny, entitled tech bro, but it’s a shallow archetype rather than a fully realized character. Jodie Turner-Smith brings commanding physical presence as Athena, Ares’ second-in-command, but she’s relegated to playing a half-realized antagonist who exists primarily to give Ares something to rebel against.
Most disappointing is how thoroughly Tron: Ares wastes Greta Lee, one of our most exciting contemporary actors. Lee is a wonderful performer — less than 24 hours after my screening Ares, I saw her in Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, where she was far more effective with only a fraction of the runtime she receives here. In Ares, she’s given virtually nothing to work with beyond running from danger and expositing plot mechanics. Eve Kim has a backstory involving a deceased sister, but the film never bothers to meaningfully explore that loss. Lee does her best to sell what’s on the page, bringing more emotional depth to the material than it deserves, but even her considerable talents can’t overcome the script’s fundamental hollowness.
What’s most dispiriting about Tron: Ares is the complete absence of philosophical ambition. The original film engaged with questions about creator-creation relationships, corporate authorship, and the nature of consciousness in digital spaces. Ares gestures vaguely at the idea that AI might develop empathy and rebel against its programming, but it can’t decide whether programs gaining permanence represents technological progress or existential threat.
For some inexplicable reason, I expected that if Disney were dusting off this property after a 15-year gap, they might have something interesting to say, some new angle worth exploring. Instead, Tron: Ares feels like executives rifling through the studio’s IP portfolio looking for underexploited assets rather than artists with a genuine vision for what this franchise could become. There’s no long-term strategy on display, no narrative cohesion that justifies continuation. The film ends with dangling threads that could theoretically lead to another installment, but that strikes me as wildly optimistic given how little Ares has to offer beyond its exceptional soundtrack. Tron has long been a property that Disney hasn’t known what to do with, and this represents the latest example of that creative confusion. If future entries will be this bland and surface-level, one has to wonder: why bother?