‘TRON: ARES’ Is a Pretty Husk Wishing It Were a Real Boy

A big, empty spectacle of a movie, TRON: Ares is what happens when a franchise decides that a cyberpunk aesthetic alone is enough to carry a series. As a purely audio-visual experience, it’s a serviceably neon-soaked theater seat rocker, but the blasé script never locks onto anything narratively compelling or really has any justification for this story coming back to life after a 15-year hiatus. It relies entirely on expensive-looking action set pieces and a ripping Nine Inch Nails score to distract from the gaping void at its center, and might be able to pull off just that magic trick if not for the almost total lack of emotional calibration. Despite a solid cast that includes Greta Lee, Jared Leto, Evan Peters, and, randomly, Hasan Minhaj, the film struggles to make its characters feel like anything other than algorithmic husks. The story’s lack of emotional stakes only amplifies how fundamentally unfeeling this movie manages to be.

Set sometime after TRON: Legacy, a film I mostly remember for Jeff Bridges and his unsettlingly smooth, digitally-de-aged antagonistic clone, this third entry in the very loosely connected Tron “trilogy” sees the real and digital worlds on a collision course with supposedly life-altering consequences for both. Director Joachim Rønning, who made Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and the surprisingly solid Disney sports drama Young Woman and the Sea, updates the original and its sequel’s striking aesthetic for the modern age, but still fails to give the series anything resembling substance. The result is a film full of glossy, occasionally striking set pieces, especially when the digital Grid bleeds into Earth’s city landscapes, but one that fails to make you care about any of it at almost any point.

Greta Lee plays Eve Kim, the successor CEO of Kevin Flynn’s (Jeff Bridges) company, Encom, who aims to harness artificial intelligence to enhance the human experience. Following the death of her sister, Eve has been obsessed with stabilizing digital creations in the real world through a MacGuffin called the Permanence Code, a discovery that could revolutionize everything from food production to medicine by allowing for digital creation to stay in the real world. Her corporate rival Julian Dillinger, played with screamy nepo-baby energy by Evan Peters, chases the same breakthrough by any means necessary.Enter Ares (Jared Leto) a next-gen Program written by Dillinger and imported into his competitor’s systems to do corporate espionage IRL. Though designed to obey his master’s every command, Ares’ brushes with the real world inspire in him rogue “feelings”. Rain proves especially inspiring for these digital beings, a nod perhaps to Roy Batty. This is compounded by the fact that Ares’ existence consists of endless loops of pain, death, and rebirth, leading him to question his programming and rebel against his creator and his plan to beat his Eve to market. The problem is that in this battle between two corporate giants racing to be the first to unleash A.I. with world-altering implications unto society, we’re asked to care about the I.P. of the billionaire with purer motives. It would be tone-deaf if it weren’t so transparently meaningless. “Which tech giant will be the first trillionaire?” isn’t the compelling narrative juice that Jesse Wigutow’s script supposed it to be.

Ares’ emerging empathy and desire to escape his doomed cycle position him as both a dangerous weapon and a potential savior of the digital world, though the movie never quite figures out what to do with that. By the end, he’s less a character than a dangling thread with a savior complex, teasing some hypothetical TRON sequel probably due in 2045 (judging by the franchise’s average release cycle). Story-wise, almost everything found in here is bland and forgettable. There’s so little memorable that if asked even a week from now, I’d probably struggle to recall any major plot beats. And while TRON has always favored style over substance, bringing the Grid’s characters into the real world doesn’t make things more human. It only highlights how mechanical the storytelling in this world truly is. The clear standout remains the Nine Inch Nails score, which absolutely slaps over the booming IMAX speakers. For brief stretches, it almost convinces you the film has pulse and purpose.

The performances are serviceable, though flawed. Greta Lee is a great actor, which may be why she feels so out of place here. Her reactions to green-screen backdrops and CGI chaos often register less as awe and more as disbelief, the look of someone trying to imagine what they’re supposed to be impressed by. Jared Leto, meanwhile, is perfectly cast as an AI messiah, robotically monotone and shaggy-bearded, a digital Jesus with resting code-face. The role demands flatness, and Leto delivers that with precision. His few moments of humor come from his awkward literalism, and they kind of work, just not quite enough to make you laugh out loud.

To Rønning’s credit, the action is cleanly staged and mostly coherent. The geography is clear, the editing isn’t chaotic, the whole highlighter color scheme is unique enough to give the movie a look all its own. But it never truly thrills. It’s technically competent but emotionally inert, the cinematic equivalent of a system running smoothly with nothing worth running. You admire the mechanics, but you don’t feel the momentum. And that’s the heart of the problem. TRON: Ares delivers all the ingredients of a blockbuster: big scope, slick visuals, a killer score. What it doesn’t deliver is the feeling. It’s ironic that a film about digital beings yearning for humanity feels so algorithmic. Like the programs it depicts, it’s executing commands without ever coming to life.

CONCLUSION: ‘Tron: Ares’ is somehow better than it has any right to be, but it’s unadulterated style over substance, a movie that impresses on an audio-visual level that will leave you completely emotionally flat.