Crew
Director – Joachim Rønning, Screenplay – Jesse Wigutow, Story – David DiGiglio & Jesse Wigutow, Producers – Sean Bailey, Jared Leto, Steven Lisberger, Emma Ludbrook, Jeffrey Silver & Justin Springer, Photography – Jeff Cronenweth, Music – Nine Inch Nails, Visual Effects Supervisor – David Seager, Visual Effects – Industrial Light and Magic (Supervisors – Jeff Capogreco, Abishek Naia & Vincent Papaix, Animation Supervisors – Jhon Alvarado & Michael Beaulieu), Special Effects Supervisor – Cameron Waldnbauer, Production Design – Darren Gilford. Production Company – Disney.
Cast
Jared Leto (Ares), Greta Lee (Eve Kim), Evan Peters (Julian Dillinger), Jodie Turner-Smith (Athena), Gillian Anderson (Elizabeth Dillinger), Jeff Bridges (Kevin Flynn), Arturo Castro (Seth Flores), Masan Minhaj (Ajay Singh), Sarah Desjardins (Erin)
Plot
Julian Dillinger, the head of Dillinger Systems, premieres a new technology that allows him to manifest objects created on The Grid into the physical world. He introduces Ares, his Master Control Program, as the new soldier of the future. What he has not told investors is that the process is only stable for 29 minutes. Eve Kim, the CEO of ENCOM, tracks down Kevin Flynn’s old workshop in Alaska where his computer contains The Permanence Code that allows the stabilisation of objects beyond that limit. Her efforts are detected by Ares on The Grid. Ares and his lieutenant Athena emerge into the real world on Light Cycles in a race to capture Eve. She destroys the drive with the chip, but Julian digitizes Eve and transports her inside The Grid. There he orders Ares to obtain the code from Eve’s head. However, Ares balks at this as it will mean having to destroy Eve to do so. He rebels against his orders and flees with Eve to protect her.
The original Tron (1982) was not a box-office or critical success when it came out. It has however been recognised as the classic it was in the years subsequent. Particularly revolutionary was its look that took us inside a computer and showed a unique realm in clean digital lines and candy apple colours. People didn’t know it at the time but it was the first depiction of cyberspace and internet on screen. In part of their resurrection of any IP under their roof, Disney made a sequel with Tron Legacy (2010) but that failed to hold anything up to the original.
A third Tron film has been tossed around by Disney ever since Tron Legacy came out. Disney have handed director’s chair over to Joachim Rønning. The Norwegian Rønning, along with Espen Sandberg, had an international hit with the true-life adventure film Kon-Tiki (2012). The two were brought to the US by Disney to handle Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017). On his own, Rønning went on to make Maleficent, Mistress of Evil (2019). Rønning now appears to have slipped into being a Disney hired gun – certainly. both Dead Men Tell No Tales and Mistress of Evil were Disney sequels that were better than expectation.
Tron was a groundbreaking work that predicted the coming of cyberspace and the internet. Despite the changes in computing, Tron Legacy never came up with anything as innovative. As a result, I had no high expectations of Tron Ares. Even that failed to give indication of what an utter disappointment and failure as a film it is.
Where Tron did amazing cutting-edge things that predicted coming technological changes, Tron Ares is stuck down at a level that just leaves you conceptually dead – the big fight in the film is over … wait for it – a glorified 3D printer. When it comes to the opening scene where Evan Peters materialises a bunch of virtual super-soldiers in avatar bodies what it feels exactly like is that we are back in a cheap 1990s cyber-action movie such as Hologram Man (1995), Virtual Combat (1995) and especially Virtuosity (1995).
It is clear that someone in the conception stage had the idea – what if we bring aspects of The Grid out into the real world? – and people became all excited and decided it had to be done without any thought about what this might mean in practical terms. And the results are expectedly absurd. Thus we get Light Cycle races that takes place through city streets where Jared Leto and Greta Lee buzz about on neon cycles and leave trails of light behind them that cause vehicles to crash or be bisected. Later, Jodie Turner-Smith pilots a Recognizer through the streets.
There is no debate that these individual effects scenes look cool and spectacular. However, on any level beyond that, they are ridiculous. Videogames and virtual environments operate free of constraints from any real-world physics. When something like a cycle creates a barrier of light in its wake in a virtual environment as in Tron, it is creating what in gaming terms is referred to as a Collision Boundary or Collision Mesh ie. one where the light trail acts as a physical obstacle and a player cannot pass through. But having light act in such a manner is preposterous in terms of real-world physics.
Similarly, when it comes to the idea of materialising a Recognizer into the real world and have it float around like a giant-sized scissor clamp nearly the size of some of the high-rise buildings, you cannot help but have to ask some questions about real-world physics – how does something like that with no apparent means of propulsion or even aerodynamics get off the ground or move through the air? Similarly, when Jared Leto and Greta Lee are fleeing through The Grid pursued by security drones, what do things like drowning in and racing across water, falling from a building and explosions even mean in a virtual context where there is no such thing as gravity and objects have no weight or substance, where someone doesn’t even have a physical body that could drown or be hurt? They are there solely because they are part of the arsenal of action films and someone thought it would be awesome to translate these into virtual terms without concern for believability.
Another scripting absurdity is that we are told that the manifested avatar bodies and vehicles have a 29-minute limit. Greta Lee is materialised onto The Grid, but then she and Jared Leto make an escape and are materialised back in reality thanks to Evan Peters’ 3D printer. At that point, the film switches around to being a chase to ensure that Ares is not derezzed and eliminated. There is a big HOWEVER attached in the midst of this. And that is that Greta Lee is also materialised out of The Grid by the 3D printer at the exact same time as Jared Leto is. How is it that she does not also experience a 29-minute limit as well? While he is in imminent danger of being permanently derezzed, she keeps on going until well after the 29-minute point without any effects. Just because she was originally a human, she would have been reconstructed of the same nano-material as he – why is that she is not affected in the same way?
The entire plot of Tron Ares seem utterly ridiculous when you translate it into real world computing terms. Try and imagine the plot described in mundane terms: The virus program in your computer becomes self-aware and starts to develop feelings and a taste for 80s music. It even develops a connection to a girl after snooping through her texts. She has the secret designs of a 3D printer. An evil computer hacker wants these secrets and for some reason teleports the girl into the insides of the computer where the virus program rebels against its purpose and flees with her. They race around on the streets on vehicles manifested out of videogames where apparently the rear headlights can manifest magic beams of light that cause other vehicles to crash. Eventually the virus program discovers life in the outside world and goes on a tour of Italy on a motorcycle.
The other thing that Tron Ares does is tie back into the legacy sequel elements. There is Jeff Bridges back again near the end (and looking awfully old – no de-aged Bridges this time around). Aside from a return of the Recognizers and Light Cycles, we also get scenes where characters are transported into the Grid where it is still 1982 designs. (And apparently the tech is still compatible with and even in advance of modern computer systems). All of which shows Tron Ares is nothing more than a film that is picking the bones of a work that was innovative forty years ago.
(Winner in this site’s Worst Films of 2025 list. Nominee for Best Special Effects and Best Production Design at this site’s Best of 2025 Awards).
Trailer here