Disney’s Tron film series feels like an unusual brand within the stable of IP brands and franchises. Each film seems more aligned to being a cultural touchstone for the millennia they’re released, discussing the new era’s relationship with the technological evolution of cyberspace and artificial intelligence. Tron (1982) was a risky gamble by Disney, wanting to appeal to audiences who gravitated to science-fiction blockbusters like Star Wars (1977). It was also the directorial debut of computer animator Steven Lisberger, who had a vision revolutionizing the low-fi tech of computers to advance a breakthrough in CGI animation, visualizing the realm of cyberspace for audiences who had no frame of reference for this new frontier.
Thirty years later, Disney’s latest legacy sequel, Tron: Ares (2025), feels like the cinematic equivalent of pressing Ctrl + C to not only the original film, but of its underrated sequel, Tron: Legacy (2010). Ares is a cheapened assemblage of all the best parts of Tron and Legacy, but filtered through a command function, coated with a glistening sheen to detract from its hollowness.
After the events of Tron: Legacy, Ares sweeps the characters of Sam Flynn and Quorra under the digital rug, as it speeds through lines of successors for ENCOM and Dillinger Systems, two tech giants in an AI race to reconstruct AI programs into the real world. The trouble is, these programs have a time span of twenty-nine minutes before they disintegrate. The current CEO of ENCOM is Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who discovers the permanence code, a cheat code for AI to exist in reality without a time limit. Meanwhile, at Dillinger Systems, Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) presents Ares (Jared Leto) to his shareholders, a master control program designed to be the perfect soldier. Yet Ares gains self-awareness as he consumes information about the world, learning at an accelerated level. After he’s dispatched to retrieve the permanence code from ENCOM, Ares makes a drastic deal with Eve to make him permanent in exchange for helping Eve escape Julian and Ares’s second-in-command, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith).
Director Joachim Rønning attempts to inject as much pizzazz and distraction from the limp, inert script by Jesse Wigutow with dazzling set-pieces, yet it all feels in service of a valueless experience. There are not enough light cycle chases, AI battles, scenes inside the Grid with Ares and Athena to fill the void of a narrative that elevates the humanization of AI creations.
Early on, when Ares has finished demonstrating his powers to Julian’s board members, he takes a moment to feel rain touching his hands. It’s an obvious callback to the Tears in Rain monologue in Blade Runner (1982) and Ana de Armas’s AI character feeling rain in its sequel, Blade Runner: 2049 (2017), yet it lacks the emotional pathos of those instances where non-humans grappled with their existence through nature’s beauty. Ares’s experience is forced and concerted in conveying a semblance of characterization, of which the script fails to instill.
The special effects are lovely to look at, and they’re plussed up by a Nine Inch Nails score, yet even their electronic, buzzing, pulsating score feels like it’s emulating the reverberations of Daft Punk’s iconic score in Legacy. Rather than being a standout, NiN’s work becomes more of an extension, an assemblage of better works than a significant focal point. It’s not bad, per se, because you couldn’t do better than the gritty, aggressive, synthesized rock sounds that complemented the glossy, lustrous sheen mastered by Legacy director Joseph Kosinski.
Ares goes so far as to harken not only to Legacy’s aesthetic but also to David Fincher‘s works, as well. Fincher’s earlier cinematographer, Jeff Cronenworth, is behind the camera, and, indeed, the visuals are beautiful and marvelous to look at. So much so that one wishes there was no dialogue, and Disney takes a page from its Fantasia films, producing a wholly audio-visual symphonic theatrical experience.
One sequence comes close to becoming this dream when Julian executes a security breach into ENCOM’s database. The film visualizes this with Ares and his foot soldiers acting as viruses breaching security walls, like an action spy thriller. Yet, when someone begins speaking monotonous dialogue or when Ares finds a conscience for a fallen soldier, it breaks the immersion. The film brings you back to reality, yearning to break free from the constraints of its ineffectual screenplay.
Lee has proven herself to be a capable actress, but watching her flounder in this detached lazer-light show is demoralizing. It’s not that she’s actively bad, but Kim feels like an NPC straining to make the plot sound authentic through her expositional dialogue. It’s especially glaring when her emotional catharsis is born from the death of her sister, Tess (Selene Yun), who believed in the existence of a permanent code before Kim had completed it. Lee’s performance holds an unamused stiffness when the programs of light cycles and Ares come to the real world; it feels hardly significant to Kim other than a mild inconvenience.
Yet, her performance is far less egregious than Leto’s Ares. Once upon a time, Jared Leto was an accomplished actor, yet, since winning an Oscar back in 2014, his level of commitment and vigor has been whittled down to coasting on pure aura. It’s tired and insubstantial. Ares is a lifeless program, slowly learning what a raindrop is, the gravity of killing a person, and self-actualization, but its elements have been far better realized in other works. Whether it’s the blatant quote of “I am fearless, and therefore powerful” from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, or mimicking Patrick Bateman’s speech pattern to talk about Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough,” Leto has the personality and charisma of a damp rag. Much of the film’s emotional climax rests on Ares becoming a sentient being, capable of living outside the Grid. His performance, though, doesn’t imbue a multilayered character, but an archetype that walks and quacks as an AI-generated meme.
This doesn’t bring up Leto’s contrived appearance in the original Tron version of the Grid, in which he says, “I like the 80s,” as another attempt to harken back to stale callbacks. All of this culminates in a pointless, phoned-in cameo from Jeff Bridges returning as Kevin Flynn, where the duo engage in philosophical conversation on permanence that has all the substance of a GIF.
Bridges isn’t the only actor left out to flail on screen; many other actors are trotted out but given little to do. Gillian Anderson plays Julian’s disapproving mother, whose purpose is to glower at her son’s craven hunger for breaking the rules. Meanwhile, Peters is reduced to a powerless villain whose creations become far more overwhelming than he anticipated, especially once Athena takes his commands to retrieve the code from Kim by any means necessary. Arturo Castro plays the annoying comic relief who loves microwave burritos and will cram in a poorly-timed joke because that’s what the script requires of him. It’s an unbearable feature that reduces this film to superficiality.
Much like Ares finding kinship with Pinocchio in a desire to be real, Tron: Ares has the slick surfaces and techno-pop sensibilities of Legacy and the nostalgic 80s throwback nature of Tron, but lacks the heart of a film with anything meaningful to say. In an age where internet trolls and the White House manufacture imitations of prior media reconstituted through AI generators to be whored out as “art,” Tron: Ares couldn’t have come at a better time, ironically. It is a barren space of sound and images retrieved from a desktop’s trash can, platformed by a corporation that has lost all sense of self-respect in creating anything everlasting, in service of mining monetary worth, like a rogue data center using an infinite amount of resources.
If that sounds hyperbolic, look no further than Disney’s own embrace of AI, as Bob Iger views AI as “the most powerful technology that our company has ever seen, including its ability to enhance and enable consumers to access, experience, and enjoy our entertainment.” If Ares is the canary in the coal mine of how much art can be replicated into embalmed versions of its predecessors as long as it induces the feeling of nostalgia, then, once Disney has run through its legacy sequels, prequels, and spinoffs, prepare for Disney’s AI version of The Lion King, coming soon to a theater near you.
Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Feature Image Credited to Disney via Deadline