Tron Ares review (2025)

Tron Ares borrows too heavily from other sci-franchises like the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Terminator and a little of the MCU to remotely resemble the once cutting edge 80s cult classic. It feels like a series that’s gone through the franchise car wash and everything that made it unique in the first place has been washed out.

Easily the most frustrating aspect of Tron Ares is that buried deep down under the weak script, poor character development and flashy action sequences just to tickle the nostalgia chords for Tron fans, there actually is a compelling story that would have worked as the third installment in the saga.

It’s been a quick 15 years since Tron: Legacy hit theaters. While not an overwhelming Marvel Studios-size blockbuster, the sequel to the 1982 Tron, was a moderate success with an over $400 million worldwide gross.

Legacy charted a pretty solid path forward as Kevin Flynn’s son, Sam, traveled to the digital realm known as The Grid to determine why Kevin abandoned the family decades ago. Making peace with his father, Sam leaves The Grid along with Quorra, an anomaly within the digital system who represented the next step in The Grid’s evolutionary cycle.

With Quorra’s insight, Sam could theoretically achieve major milestones on the technology and scientific fronts. All of which could make for a fertile launch point for Tron Ares. 

Screenwriter Jesse Wigutow (working off a story he created with David Digilio) seemingly wasn’t a fan of Legacy and essentially makes Tron Ares a reboot telling the same story with a messier and less exciting script.  

Rival tech companies Dillinger Systems and ENCOM are frantically racing to take the next step in their industry — bringing AI constructs to the real world. Both companies have made huge strides on that front, but their digital creations have a 30-minute expiration date. To have prolonged success, they have to find Kevin Flynn’s Permanence Code.

Dillinger CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) is clearly positioned right away as the obnoxious tech-bro tool who wants to create laser crafted soldiers and vehicles of his digital AI constructs. Ensuring soldiers wouldn’t die on the battlefield doesn’t scream “villain!” but Peters hams it up with smirks and dismissive behavior to everyone to make sure he’s sufficiently booed. For good measure, he’s even dismissive of his mother Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson).

It’s Julian who creates the Tron Ares namesake with his AI creation Ares (Jared Leto, Suicide Squad), which he will use in any way possible to beat ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee, Past Lives). It feels a little too calculated that Lee is not more prominently featured in the trailers considering she’s the main character in Tron Ares.

Eve is the hero trying to use the Permanence Code to improve humanity. It says a lot when the most unbelievable aspect of a film featuring light cycles, flying discs and AI video game constructs being ported into the real world is a CEO who’s more concerned with helping others than their 18th vacation home.

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Ares and his top lieutenant Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) are crafted to go fetch Eve before their 30-minute countdown expires. A major sticking point with the script is why the heavily trained in warfare AI constructs are so bad at catching and capturing Eve. This should be light work for them (pun intended) especially since they’re bringing their tech into the real world.

Eve eventually gets caught and digitized into The Grid so the Code can be extracted. Ares, who has started to exhibit some signs of independence, decides to fully rebel and help get Eve out of The Grid and back to the real world. Julian isn’t thrilled with this course of action and sends Athena to retrieve Eve and deal with Ares.

Director Joachim Rønning (Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) seems conflicted in how to portray Eve. To her top aides (Arturo Castro and Hasan Minhaj), she’s fully capable of doing anything yet Eve is annoyingly cast in damsel in distress mode needing Ares’ help far too often.

The action sequences are well put together though it’s not quite as fun seeing the constructs demolish real world objects that can’t match their power. Nine Inch Nails provides the booming score, which liberally inserts as a means of conveying the notion that something important is happening when it’s really just a transition to characters moving to a new room. Years later the score might be the most enduring aspect of the film.

Tron Ares does seem poised to get dinged by a certain moviegoing demographic for having the villain be a white guy bossing around a black woman while the heroes are all people of color. The optics do get a bit fuzzy, but it’s more a failing of the script, which doesn’t properly flesh out Julian or Eve as characters so much as clashing ideologies on the AI is evil or potentially very useful debate.

Lee makes for a solid lead, but the dynamic gets shifted when Ares opts to become a hero. Instead of being T2 Sara Connor, she reverts to Terminator Sarah needing Kyle Reese to fight for her. Turner-Smith has true screen presence and comes off like a star despite the lackluster material.

Leto plays Ares fairly robotic, which allows for some decent laughs even when the humor undercuts the serious moments. It almost feels like Tron Ares would have benefitted from a more unhinged Leto performance instead of one where he’s so restrained.

Tron Ares has too much unrealized potential to justify it for anyone besides the hardcore series fans who will appreciate the new battleground, the always stylish colors and light shows. For the visuals, it’s worth the full IMAX treatment and if 3D is an option all the better. This likely won’t bring in a new generation of Tron fans.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Photo Credit: Disney

Check out the rest of the series with the Tron/Tron Legacy two pack Blu-Ray set available now on Amazon.

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