Tron: Ares Review - Jared Leto's Disney Movie Is All Style, No Substance

In the 15 years since the release of "Tron: Legacy," there were many reasons why a "Tron 3" never happened. But with the proliferation of AI as a marketing catch-all across the tech sector, ideas from that scrapped project stuck around in development long enough to become increasingly relevant. So, we have "Tron: Ares," a film that's less of a follow-up to the 2010 picture than a placeholder for a theoretical sequel that could still be made, should this semi-reboot prove successful enough to warrant it. Set years after the events of the last film, "Ares" sidesteps the characters and events of that movie without contradicting them, leaving the door open for actors like Olivia Wilde, Garrett Hedlund, and Cillian Murphy to return in the future. (To make sure you're up to speed, check out our recap video before you watch "Tron: Ares.")

Instead, we pick up here with the ongoing war between the good guys at ENCOM, here led by Eve Kim (Greta Lee); and Dillinger Systems, the purview of Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) who is also the grandson of Ed Dillinger (David Warner) from the original film. Both companies are on the verge of a major breakthrough in bringing constructs from their respective digital worlds into physical reality, but neither has found the most important missing piece — making these constructs last for longer than 29 minutes. Julian, a ruthless maverick, has sold the concept of an endless weapons supply by making his cybersecurity program Ares (Jared Leto) into a super-soldier, but Eve, trying to complete the work of her deceased sister, finds the key to permanence in testing a digital tree and the fruit it bears. Two dueling perspectives on the future hinging on code dating back to the days of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges). 

Though it may sound like a fascinating sci-fi rumination on the intersection of technology and human life, "Ares" works best as a rollicking action picture with some strong visuals and incredible soundscapes. It lacks the acting acumen and depth of writing to achieve much more. 

Just as Joseph Kosinski made good on a big budget and 30 years of special effects improvements to expand the world of "Tron" with the slick, Apple store sheen of "Tron: Legacy," director Joachim Rønning has created a more brutal, tactile evolution of this science fiction world. Rather than burrowing into the digital universes we've previously seen, those constructs and entities are bursting into our universe, and the juxtaposition is more intense and more frightening. As Dillinger's lasers build meat space simulacrums of his programs, Rønning frames their birth like you're watching a giant 3D printer go to work, complete with digital detritus that must be snapped and cracked off the objects' form once completed. The same speed and precision we're used to seeing on the grid transposed into the IRL world has an uncanny and unsettling inertia that leads to some heart stopping moments of carnage. 

But even before Ares and his fellow programs start going crazy in the streets, Rønning stages a sequence of Julian hacking ENCOM's servers like a heist set piece. On paper, it doesn't sound all that audacious, but in execution, the scene is a stunner. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, here scoring a film under the Nine Inch Nails banner for the first time ever, provide so much with their bombastic, jagged synths and thumping bass. At times, it sounds like their "Challengers" score on steroids. It's impossible to imagine the best moments from this movie working as well as they do without this music. 

There are intermittent bits of comedy that play well and small shreds of pathos on display, but this movie is at its best when a bright red wall of light is slicing buses in half while club music from hell plays so loud your ear drums feel like they're going to cave in. Seen on an IMAX screen, it's the proverbial cinematic rollercoaster summer blockbuster that trailers always try to sell you on. It's just not much more than that.

Look, Greta Lee and Evan Peters are pretty good with what little they're given. Gillian Anderson makes a meal out of her scenes as Julian's mother, aghast at what her son is doing with her company. Jodie Turner-Smith is striking as Athena, another program who works with Ares but doesn't have his rebellious streak. 

But the bulk of the movie requires the viewer to really connect with Ares, a program given sentience, an artificial intelligence coming to terms with the concept of feeling. And Jared Leto has been conscripted for that incredibly important task. An actor most known for making his co-stars uncomfortable with his jaundiced understanding of how method acting works must hold on his feeble shoulders a portrait of a collection of ones and zeroes learning to be a real boy. It is simply beyond his admittedly limited range. 

Whenever he's got a helmet on and is riding real fast on a digitally constructed motorcycle, he doesn't need to be compelling. Because it looks cool! It could be anyone under there! But whenever the action pauses to have Leto and Lee make plausibly deniable googly eyes at each other, or Leto is tasked with not ruining Jeff Bridges' three minutes of screen time, then it becomes impossible to ignore how miscast he is. Why risk the liability of having an embattled and off-putting movie star at the helm of your expensive franchise motion picture? Couldn't they have written Ares to have a funny accent so Austin Butler would want to do it?

Alas, "Tron: Ares" is a fun time that will someday see its most beautiful form, cut down to its best action scenes on YouTube, with NIN's score blaring from either end of your iPhone 17 Pro Max's stereo speakers. You won't hear Leto's voice; you won't hear anyone's voice but your own, going "damn, that was sick" whenever a car gets flipped over by a computer game come to life.

"Tron: Ares" races into theaters on October 10.