Disney goes for an all-out assault on the senses in the sci-fi action sequel, Tron: Ares. Our review of sensory overload: the movie… …so there’s this digital world, right, where people live and it looks like a massive city where nobody turns the landing lights off. And Jared Leto lives there and he’s this digital ... Tron: Ares review | Keep your pets indoors for the loudest film of 2025
Disney goes for an all-out assault on the senses in the sci-fi action sequel, Tron: Ares. Our review of sensory overload: the movie…
…so there’s this digital world, right, where people live and it looks like a massive city where nobody turns the landing lights off. And Jared Leto lives there and he’s this digital soldier who has a geography teacher beard and long greasy hair. And he can just conjure up vehicles out of thin air, like this kind of Jet Ski thing, because although it’s a virtual world there’s water but the water’s made of voxels which are like little cubes but that’s not important right now. But Jared Leto, he wants to get out of this digital world, right, and become a real human, which he can already do because Evan Peters has this special 3D laser printer that can print out things from the digital realm in our world, so digital people can walk around and talk and fight just like real people, except because they’re digital they can only exist in our reality for 29 minutes before they, like, turn to 3D cubes and start screaming and falling apart. But Greta Lee out of Past Lives, she finds this special bit of code that makes digital things permanent in our world, so the whole story becomes this big tussle for the code – Greta Lee wants it so she can make persistent orange trees, and then Jared Leto wants it so he can be a real human and maybe wash his hair, and Evan Peters wants it so he can sell weapons to the military, and, and…
And breathe.
Tron Ares is a lot. An audio-visual blitzkrieg that will either have audiences dazzled by its style and sheer volume, or leave them reeling for the exits. It’s the latest in a sporadic series of updates to 1982’s Tron – director Steven Lisberger’s technically innovative yet emotionally flat Wizard Of Oz for the age of Atari videogames. Disney hoped for a Star Wars-level effects-driven hit; instead, it had to make do with a film that became a cult item over time.
Next came director Joseph Kosinski’s mirror-slick Tron: Legacy in 2010 – a fast-paced fantasy adventure hampered by an unconvincingly de-aged Jeff Bridges and a story that never rose above the mildly diverting. It was a Tron film for the post-Avatar era where everyone wore disposable plastic 3D shades to watch their movies.
Stylistically, Swedish filmmaker Joachim Rønning’s Tron: Ares is more 2010 than 1982 – like the last film, it’s driven by a loud, propulsive score, this time by Nine Inch Nails (replacing the previous film’s Daft Punk). But where Kosinski’s fantasy was all cool hues and clinical detachment, Tron: Ares goes for something altogether more aggressive. In places, it looks stunning; at times, it feels almost exhausting. It’s probably just as well the 3D phase has passed, because a stereoscopic version of this movie would probably make people’s eyes drop out.
Building on its predecessors, Tron Ares imagines a world where artificial intelligence and advanced digital worlds (called Grids) have been a reality for over 40 years. Encom, the company once owned by David Warner’s Ed Dillinger in the first film, is now run by Greta Lee’s CEO Eve Kim, who’s hunting for a hidden ‘permanence code’ written by Kevin Flynn, Jeff Bridges’ erstwhile programmer from the previous Trons. Eve hopes to use it in order to change the world for the better; via a mixture of AI, the Grid and special lasers, she hopes to conjure up an inexhaustible supply of food and medicine.
In the other corner, there’s Ed Dillinger’s bratty grandson Julian (Evan Peters) and his stern mother Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson) who, ousted from Encom, have a self-named rival company and, seemingly, their own personal Grid. Julian wants to use particle lasers to print out an infinite number of high tech war machines and soldiers to sell to the US military – the sticking point being that those soldiers and machines can only remain in the real world for 29 minutes before they disintegrate.
Julian therefore wants that permanence code, and sends his best digital soldiers, Ares (Jared Leto) and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith, the best performer in the whole movie) to get it. What Julian hasn’t reckoned on is that Ares wants to be free from the Grid, and plans to steal the code for himself.
There is much in Tron Ares that borders on outright calamity. The acting, for the most part, is bad. The dialogue is even worse – a hodgepodge of exposition and such redundancies as “bring the particle laser!” Much of the speaking is drowned out by the soundtrack in any case, and Tron: Ares may have functioned better had it not bothered with any conversations at all. You know how you get those monochromatic versions of movies, like Mad Max: Black And Chrome? Tron Ares: No Dialogue would probably be an improvement.
For the first 20 minutes, Tron: Ares, written by one Jesse Wigutow, flounders about in search of a compelling viewpoint or trajectory. We’re bombarded by scene-setting news bulletins, product launches and action set pieces, plus the odd visit to Eve holed up in a tent in some snowy tundra, but it’s unclear who the protagonist is. Eve initially seems like a secondary character, while Jared Leto is so unblinking and inhuman as Ares that it’s hard to believe he’s meant to be the hero – even if that is his name up there on the title.
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Then there’s a terrific sequence where Eve, now carrying the permanence code on a USB stick, is pursued through a benighted city by Ares and Athena, and the film springs to life. Riding their updated lightcycles (twists on designs by Syd Mead and Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, who get a cute namecheck here), the digital soldiers slice police cars in half and turn the entire metropolis into a maze of red hot light trails. Despite his constantly moving camera, Rønning brings a coherence and fluidity to the whole thing, not to mention a sense of physical weight and danger.
There’s another moment in a multi-storey car park where Eve, cornered and panicked, looks over a barrier and sees Athena sprinting up the spiralling concrete ramp towards her, and the way it’s shot and edited is thrilling. The cinematographer here is David Fincher’s regular collaborator Jeff Cronenweth, son of Jordan, and it’s superb work – he and Rønning create a sense of a Terminator-like unstoppable force.
This isn’t an isolated moment, either – there are some magnificent set-pieces in Tron: Ares that similarly mix photorealism and the neon-streaked lightshow we’ve seen in the previous pair of movies. It can’t have been an easy challenge to pull off, but they’ve managed it; the strength of the filmmaking is such that even that old chestnut, a collapsing skyscraper, actually feels substantial rather than just another special effect. Rønning, who previously directed Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil and the wonderful period sports drama Young Woman And The Sea, certainly knows how to stage an action sequence.
Sizeable chunks of Tron: Ares are, however, taken up by long stretches where the over-amped quality of the sound and visuals becomes overbearing. That music and the visual effects may be the star of the show, but the perfunctory dialogue and nondescript acting leave us without a protagonist to pin our emotions on. Ares’ desire to become a human is barely felt; Eve’s tragic backstory is so quickly related that we barely have time to think about it.
There’s a scene where Ares drives a Honda Civic and talks about his affection for Depeche Mode where the movie might be shooting for the same emotional pull as Starman – John Carpenter’s 1984 film that contained another vintage performance from Jeff Bridges. There, Bridges played an alien slowly coming to understand what it feels like to be human; it was fascinating to watch this character turn from unknowable entity to recognisably humane.
Leto, unfortunately, doesn’t have Bridges’ deftness and skill, and his attempts to lighten his character with the odd quip fall conspicuously flat. The film’s biggest laughs appear to be accidental, including the reading of what might be the longest postcard ever written.
Tron Ares isn’t a disaster. Fans of the series will probably be delighted at some of the references to earlier films, including a disarming nod to the original Grid in all its glowing, low-poly glory. Jeff Bridges makes an odd yet welcome cameo, as does David Warner, looking down disapprovingly from a faux oil painting.
There’s also a perfunctory nod to Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde’s characters from Tron: Legacy, which is unexpected because, for the most part, Tron Ares doesn’t pick up on its predecessor’s plot all that much. Remember when an uncredited Cillian Murphy was teased as the new Ed Dillinger – a villain for a direct sequel that never happened? No? Well, Disney doesn’t appear to, either.
It’s in these moments that Tron: Ares becomes fascinating in its sheer strangeness. It’s the second sequel in a franchise that, despite its comparatively small following, keeps producing these vastly expensive and visually orgiastic movies. What discernible themes are there in here, buried beneath the sound and fury? Who is it aimed at? Why is it so aggressive? It’s a hard film to wholeheartedly recommend, but at the same time, there’s a level of unhinged genius in its folly.
Tron: Ares could be this generation’s Speed Racer: an obnoxiously in-your-face dervish of a movie that may, in time, pick up a devoted cult following of its own.
Tron: Ares is in UK cinemas from the 10th October.
