Tron: Ares Review: Error Loading

Earlier this year, I was talking with Josh D’Amaro, Chairman of Disney Experiences, about the process for developing new rides for Disney parks. We talked specifically about why, 34 years after the release of groundbreaking CG adventure Tron, they finally decided to build the Tron Lightcycle Power Run coaster. His answer, basically, was that if people keep talking about a movie or a franchise, then the ride will be a success.

One has to wonder if that was the process for getting Tron: Ares made, since it can’t be because either the 1982 original or the 2010 sequel, Tron: Legacy, set the box office alight. It’s probably more that, while neither film was great, the idea and the look is immediately recognizable and alluring: falling into a proto-internet called the Grid where programs are alive, and wild, fast-moving games are everyday life. The hope has always been that someone would take what worked about the earlier Tron movies and finally make it really work.

Unfortunately, Tron: Ares ignores those core conceits and most of the prior storylines, and replaces them with an extremely poorly timed script about good and noble corporations, and AIs trying to save the world.

Apparently all the characters from Legacy had something better to do than turn up for this threequel, which centers on the previously unseen Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who now runs the heroic ENCOM gaming company and is trying to perfect 3D printed oranges. Her rival, Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), wants to use the same tech to bring his AI/security software, Ares, into the real world, where it just so happens to look like Jared Leto. The problem that all three face is that the newly printed bodies collapse after 29 years, and so everyone is on the hunt for a missing bit of code that will stop Ares derezing and going back into the Grid. The upside for the audience? Now all the cool in-game visuals from the previous films finally get to invade our world as Dillinger’s mad scheme is subverted by another piece of malevolent software, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith). Unfortunately, it’s all in service of one long, breathless, oddly tedious chase scene for the code.

There is, of course, something impossibly cool about seeing light cycles zooming along real streets, or a giant hovering Recognizer kaijuing its way through buildings – but that’s all it is. Ares is a series of disconnected gorgeous images, given a semblance of structure from a score by Nine Inch Nails that cribs heavily from both the Chemical Brothers and Dust Brothers. Even those visuals don’t even make much sense: Dillinger may be able to build jets from thin air and lasers, but how do they work IRL? How does he suddenly have solid light technology just because it exists in the Grid? There are no answers, just a mix of cod philosophy and technobabble that will make you yearn for the intellectual rigor of The Matrix Revolutions.

Speaking of unnecessary sequels, between this, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Joachim Rønning has established a reputation as a director of legacy sequels that do their franchises no favors. Every character is paper-thin, and even if Leto and Peters push their one-note parts as much as possible, everyone else seems to just read the lines as they were written on the page. Rønning doesn’t seem confident in his storytelling acumen, relying instead on running narration provided by real-life TV anchors cold-reading the least convincing announcements this side of a Fox News host talking about Portland. If, as threatened by a mid-credits sequence, Disney is dedicated to keeping this franchise going, maybe it’s time for a complete reboot.

Tron: Ares

2025, PG-13, 119 mins. Directed by Joachim Rønning. Starring Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, Evan Peters, Jeff Bridges, Gillian Anderson.

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

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