Director - Joachim Rønning
Cast - Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson, Jeff Bridges
Duration – 119 Minutes
 
“Tron: Ares” arrives with the pixelated glow of promise, carrying the weight of legacy, ambition, and Jared Leto’s glowing suit. It’s been 15 years since Tron: Legacy rebooted Disney’s cult classic with slick neon visuals and a Daft Punk-fueled score, and now, in the age of AI anxiety and digital escapism, Ares tries to plug into something deeper: permanence in a world of impermanence.
 
What we get instead is a visually sleek but narratively scrambled entry — a film that looks stunning on the surface but often crashes when trying to upload emotion, coherence, or meaningful stakes. It’s not broken, but it feels unfinished — like a beta build missing a critical update.
 
Set 15 years after the events of Tron: Legacy, the film centers around a tech arms race: bringing programs into the real world. On one side, you have ENCOM’s noble idealism, led by CEO Eve Kim (played with steel and smarts by Greta Lee), and on the other, the shady Dillinger Systems, run by the next-gen villain Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of the original villain from 1982.
 
Enter Ares, played by Jared Leto, a self-aware Master Control Program with a digital soul, a longing for the real world, and just enough existential angst to make him a compelling — if inconsistent — protagonist. Ares is designed as the perfect digital soldier, but what he wants is something more human: meaning, life, permanence. His journey becomes a hybrid of Frankenstein, Pinocchio, and your average Marvel origin story.
 
Jared Leto gives a surprisingly restrained performance, dialed back from his usual theatrical flair, which works for the programmed precision of Ares. There’s a flicker of depth beneath the surface — a synthetic soul trying to understand humanity — but the film rarely gives him the space to fully explore it.
 
Greta Lee is the film’s beating heart. As Eve, she grounds the movie in something emotional, even when the script leaves her scrambling through exposition. Her arc — overshadowed by a saintly sister and burdened with saving humanity through a flash drive — could’ve had more weight if the movie slowed down to let her breathe.
 
Evan Peters, as Julian, leans into smarmy tech-bro villainy with just enough Elon-Musk-meets-Loki energy to keep things interesting. Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, and Gillian Anderson round out the ensemble with competent but underwritten roles.
 
Surprisingly, Jeff Bridges returns as Kevin Flynn in a brief but philosophical cameo that lands like a soft echo of what could have been the film’s emotional center.
 
With Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross handling the score, Tron: Ares trades Daft Punk’s laser-smooth synths for something darker, more industrial. It’s immersive and effective — particularly in action set pieces — but it lacks the iconic punch of its predecessor. The music enhances tension but never transcends the visuals the way Daft Punk did in Legacy.
 
Visually, the film is a stunner. Director Joachim Rønning and his production designers clearly had fun building out this new chapter of the Grid and the digital/physical interface. The Light Cycle chases, Recognizer battles, and de-rez sequences are still the franchise’s signature spectacle — glowing, fast, and clean.
But the aesthetics can’t cover the glitches in the story. For all its world-building, the screenplay overloads on jargon and under-delivers on clarity, leaving casual viewers confused and fans squinting for meaning. There's too much plot, too many concepts (permanence code, identity discs, digitization, grids within grids) and not enough payoff.
 
In many ways, “Tron: Ares” feels like an ambitious tech demo — promising new features, great hardware, but still in need of a software patch. It asks compelling questions about identity, AI, and digital mortality, but then sprints past them to get to the next Light Cycle duel. The emotional beats — particularly Ares’ bond with Eve and Athena’s sentience arc — arrive too late and too lightly.
 
The film ends with a flicker of hope, teasing a search for Sam and Quorra, and a potential fourth entry that might tie it all together. But with its disappointing box office and muted critical reception, whether we’ll ever revisit the Grid again is uncertain.
 
If this is the final ride, it's a visually thrilling but emotionally unsatisfying exit from a franchise that always looked like the future — even when its story got stuck in the past.
 
Best for: Tron die-hards, cyberpunk fans, anyone still mourning Daft Punk
Skip if: You need emotional coherence or a tightly written narrative.