Last night my wife Dakota and I watched the 2025 movie TRON: Ares. I don’t know where to begin with this review – it makes me want to cry. TRON fans deserve better than this.
Before you read this, please know that I’m a BIG fan of the original TRON. I’m a BIG fan of 2010s TRON: Legacy. I love the TV series TRON: Uprising. Anything TRON related, I’ve always been totally on-board with everything that’s come out of that world. Spoiler warning for the rest of the read.
If you’ve seen the original 1982 TRON movie, you’ll know all about “The Grid.” If you saw the 2010 TRON: Legacy, you’ll know all about the killer soundtrack Daft Punk created for the movie, and the spectacular visuals created for the world of TRON. And if you haven’t seen either movie before, they’re excellent. But when it comes to TRON: Ares, that’s a different story.
People didn’t go into TRON: Legacy FOR Daft Punk, they just HAPPEN to be there, and happen to make one of the greatest movie soundtracks of all time. We didn’t go into the movie for Nine Inch Nails, but the advertising campaign made it seem like we were. But the soundtrack IS good. The music rules.
The movie starts out and immediately disconnects itself from the first two movies. Within the opening sequence they’re saying, “everything that happened in those last two movies, forget about it!” Maybe it was so they could do whatever they wanted? Maybe it was to not have anything canonically wrong with this, but even when wiping the slate clean, it still sucked.
In this movie, instead of our “users” going into “the grid,” the the CEO of Dillenger and ENCOM are working on technology to get the programs into our world. Hyperactive 3D printing hardware allowing the programs to exist in our reality, but they have a life limit of 29 minutes – so they need a code to allow them to stay here timelessly. The Ares character “longs to feel” what the world is like, a computer that can touch the rain, feel the sun, and love.
The character set up is messy, and totally disregards everything the first two movies set up. There’s no CLU, there’s no TRON, and it spits in the face of what the “Master Control” is from the original movie. Greta Lee is irritating throughout the entire movie, Evan Peters is a rage-bait CEO kid with dumb tattoos, and Jared Leto’s character Ares is dumb. His longing for the real world and wanting to feel was already done in the previous film with Kora, and we had more emotion with her for 2 minutes at the end of LEGACY than we get with Jared Leto’s character the entire movie of Ares. Every time he mentions being in the real world, it comes across as cheesy, gimmicky, and lame. I don’t care how much you like Depeche Mode, Jared.
Tron: Ares is trying to follow up how visually immersive and beautiful Tron: LEGACY was, yet it constantly falls flat. Not only due to over HALF of the movie taking place in “our world,” but whoever made this movie does NOT understand what makes the world of Tron, TRON. It WANTS to be visually spectacular, but it always has either too much going on, or nothing at all. During the moments of “too much going on,” when streaming this movie, the technology is not there to keep up with its visual beauties, causing a diminish in quality over the course of the movie, almost forcing people to watch this on a disc version. Streaming this movie will not do the visuals justice.
What’s the message of the overall TRON movie? Showcasing how computers can be great for our future in regards to both business and video games. TRON: LEGACY was showcasing how great video games and business’ have become thanks to the technology of computers and how there’s still a world to discover. Tron: Ares is showcasing… A.I.? And asking us… no, telling us, “A.I. is great isn’t it?” This whole movie feels very PRO-A.I. I’m not about it. The message comes across as “let’s have A.I. integrate into our lives as much as possible! What could go wrong?”
Then there’s the RETRO Grid. A cool throwback that ends up being 100% fan fair. It IS cool to see the dissonance between the modern look of TRON and the 80s TRON – but it comes across as disheartened, a grimmick, and being so aware of itself that it lacks it’s own confidence within it’s own movie. AND JARED LETO IS SO BAD AT NOT SHUTTING UP! We can CLEARLY see on screen that it’s back to the 80s computer graphics, you don’t have to constantly comment on what is going on – show it, don’t tell it.
Yet, I really enjoyed that part of the movie a lot. And I did enjoy the movie overall? Simply because it’s TRON. I LOVE TRON. And I think this movie IS cool. It’s REALLY cool! Very cool. But anything can be as cool as possible, yet if it doesn’t have heart and soul behind the project, it’s dead on arrival, and that’s how this movie feels. No true passion behind this movie, just another cash grab from Disney to get TRON fans to shut up. It’s almost like Disney WANTED this movie to fail. Knowing that it would. So the fans would stop bugging them about a franchise that Disney has deemed dead years ago. It’s really sad to see visually, and from the story, how much potential this movie had. There was SO MUCH they could’ve done right, and they blatantly choose not to.
Get this pro A.I. slop of a movie outta here. I want to rewatch it, but I don’t want to rewatch the story.
1 ½ out of 5 stars.
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