Tron: Ares Review

“I’m looking for something. Something I do not understand” – Ares

Looking at the quote I’ve chosen above, it pretty much sums up the feeling I had when I went in to the screening of Tron back in 1982. (And if anything makes me realise that I’m getting on in years, it’s the realisation that I first saw Tron forty-three years ago.) Let’s see, I was 22 years old, I had very limited experience playing arcade games, and no experience at all of computers. All the tech speak was completely lost on me, though I’d make up for that ignorance in time, as computing became a focal point of my career. But despite these handicaps, I really enjoyed the film. I loved the concept that our interactions with arcade games were life or death to the characters inside the game, and that a programmer’s program would be his personification in the cyber world. Plus, the movie had a unique look that I had never seen before. These days, I’m proud of the bragging rights that I’ve been a fan of the Tron universe since day one, when it wasn’t a big cinematic hit. People stayed away in droves, and it only became a cult hit for Disney much later on as gaming and computing became a more mainstream activity.

It took 28 years for Tron to get its sequel in Tron: Legacy, and I thought that was that. We’re done. Tron: Legacy was darker than the original, both in appearance and tone, which made sense to me because the target audience was more tech savvy in 2010 than we were back in ’82. Disney might well have been happier to take the risk.

As soon as I saw the trailer for the third entry in the series, now 15 years later – I was in. There was no way I wasn’t seeing this, and honestly, along with Superman, Fantastic Four: First Steps and Jurassic World: Rebirth, Tron: Ares has been one of my most eagerly looked forward to movies of 2025. The trailer showing familiar elements of the Tron world breaking through into ours hooked and reeled me right in. (Sometimes, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, I can be that easy.)

As in real life, fifteen years have passed since the events of Tron: Legacy, where Sam Flynn (Garret Hedlund) tried to rescue his father Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) from “The Grid” where he had become imprisoned. In the intervening years, ENCOM (good guys) and Dillinger Systems (bad guys) are in a tech race to find Kevin Flynn’s Permanence Code. This is a line of code which will allow constructs which are brought from The Grid and made real by a 3-D printing kind of device to become, well, permanent. As the film begins, all constructs have a 29-minute lifespan before they turn to dust.

This is vital to Dillinger CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) the grandson of Ed Dillinger played by the late David Warner in the original Tron. He is about to launch a major defence program which will net the company billions. This is in the form of Ares (Jared Leto), a completely dispensable super soldier that is a construct from The Grid. Except the shareholders have no idea that he’ll turn to dust and will need to be rebuilt after 29 minutes, rendering him almost useless. His mother Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson) knows and she’s opposed to the whole idea. Meanwhile, as Sam Flynn has gone missing, ENCOM is being run by Eve Kim (Greta Lee) who is close to finding Flynn’s code. And that’s the basic set-up, I don’t want to go into spoiler territory, other than what can be seen in the trailer.

It seems to me that much like the music scores to the movies (and I’m listening to the awesome Ares soundtrack CD by Nine Inch Nails as I’m writing this – I’m still a devoted collector of physical media) the films have become heavier and darker as times have moved on and technology is moving along so swiftly, seeming threateningly so at times. I found the colour palette of Legacy to be cold and overly dark with everything basically blue (this was my own fault for watching it in 3D, which is naturally darker, I guess.) This time around, the appearance of the film is much brighter, with the dominant colour being a vibrant red. So, we have lightcycle chases in a contemporary city at night, leaving bright scarlet light trails behind them which looks absolutely stunning. The visual effects on display are certainly the best I’ve seen in any of the three movies. The promised scene of one of the Recognizers hovering menacingly over the city does NOT disappoint.

Plot-wise, I guess the film owes a debt to Terminator 1 & 2 in that there’s a relentless chase and incredible property damage. And of course, we have the element of a huge tech company bringing us to the brink with the tech they’ve developed with little regard to what can happen should everything go wrong (y’know like the media tells us it inevitably will with Artificial Intelligence. I swear, as soon as my smart speaker starts torturing me with Country and Western music on purpose, I’ll unplug it and live off the grid like a hermit.)

I guess the elephant in the room has to be addressed. That pachyderm’s name is Jared Leto. What I’ve seen of him appears to me to be hit or miss. I’m one of very few who liked his Joker performance in Suicide Squad, and I’m still holding out for a director’s cut which according to rumours would be more Joker heavy. That, to me, would be a good thing. Morbius though – nobody really came out of that looking really good, did they? He did his best though. Frankly, Ares is in my opinion his best performance to date.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a fair warning that if you haven’t seen the previous Tron films, you won’t get anything out of this one. There are so many references, easter eggs and a return to previous tech and locations both in the real world and The Grid you’d be lost and confused very quickly. Fans of the Tron universe are in for a satisfying treat, if you’re new to it – go do your research first and watch what came before. You’ll thank me later.

Rob Rating = 9