Tron: Ares (2025)

Score: 4 / 5

Tron is a strange franchise, one never really destined for all-time greatness, yet curiously enduring and improving over the decades with few and far-between entries. The story is actually quite dense and interesting, though largely inaccessible due to wooden dialogue and somewhat fanciful depictions of the inner workings of computer software. Rendered narratively inert -- or close to it -- then, the films work almost entirely as a result of their iconic special effects and visual splendor. Technological light shows scored by brilliant, equally iconic music make these films consummate entertainment. It helps that, after the 1982 original film, 2010's Legacy and now 2025's Ares have leaned into the stylized elements while also eliciting much more grounded and dynamic performances from well-cast leading actors. And Ares is certainly my favorite of the three.

Without Tron, we likely wouldn't have The Matrix or Wreck-It Ralph or Ready Player One. And, I'd argue, its design is more inspired, interesting, and thoughtful than those. Its cold, dark, bleak depiction of cyberspace built up in neon cities based around data hubs lends itself to a focused meditation on how our Age of Information might be physically represented. It's also cleaner and much more chic than the crumbling wastelands or candy-colored theme parks of the other titles I mention. It's arguably even as kinky as The Matrix, though more subtle. And its weighty thematic elements -- at least in the two sequels -- rival that of most science fiction in its earnest dramatization of sons becoming their fathers, the sins of the father returning, gods and CEOs vying for power, artificial intelligences taking over, and a revolutionary approach to liberation.

With a magnificent score from Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross), director Joachim Ronning fashions a stylish and sexy action movie with abundant thrills and more ideas than it knows how to handle. Much like the philosophical tone of Blade Runner, here we're launched into a violent race against time as characters enter and exit The Grid, Flynn's alternate reality of gaming codes, now made public and interconnecting servers around the world. Flynn's old nemesis Dillinger has reared his head again, in the form of his daughter (Gillian Anderson) and her son (Evan Peters), the new CEO. Their company has created a Master Control Program whose AI is so profoundly effective that they can create a body for him in the real world (using a magical form of 3D printing) and he'll be their super-soldier for all of 29 minutes.

His mission: permanence. To bring imagined codes in the Grid to real life, the Dillinger company will stop at nothing, even espionage and murder. So the CEO sends his new creation, Ares (an incredible Jared Leto), to find and take a rumored "permanence code" from the ENCOM CEO, Eve Kim (a ballsy and exciting Greta Lee). Kim has been running Flynn's old company well, and the film wisely builds on what has come before. I won't spoil things for the fans out there, but there is a sequence over halfway through the film that absolutely sent me into nostalgic joy, culminating in a legacy appearance so effective it brought me to tears. By film's end, Ares marks alongside Ex Machina or Her as one of the most moving and beautiful depictions of AI on film.

While lionizing the benefits of AI thus, at this particular moment in time, feels irresponsible at best, I don't entirely think that should derail our appreciation of this magnificent film. Much less dominate conversation about it. Let's keep it in conversation, of course, but I do think it's significant that the film ends with an embodied, limited portrayal of AI and an admittedly optimistic perspective: if we so fear AI wanting to become more human-like, have we considered that that includes death and dissolution? Ares himself muses, late in the film, that though he's searching for a "permanence code," so called because it would allow digital beings and items to exist in the real world for more than 29 minutes, it should really be called the "impermanence code." Essentially, Ares's sought-after permanence would actually make him mortal.

The visual flourishes of this series -- especially of the latter two entries -- hint at far more than surface pleasures. Kim's opening scene feels like an ironic inversion of the Garden of Eden, in which Eve herself enters a frozen waste with little more than filial love in her mind, not just sampling the fruits of her miraculous labors but in fact creating the tree of both life and knowledge. She's an idealist and dreamer, but that doesn't stop her from roughhousing when things turn sour, making her a riveting protagonist among this ensemble cast. We sadly don't have Michael Sheen's Zuse in this one, of course, but we are given other fabulous new characters like Jodie Turner-Smith's lethal and chilling Athena. And then there's the eye-popping finale that, while perhaps stealing a bit from The Avengers in visuals of Dillinger's cyber soldiers materializing in the real world of Center City and wreaking havoc while hunting their mark.

Hinging strongly on a Frankenstein reference, Ares himself dominates both narrative and screen, making the logical choice after Legacy to further continue the series' attentions to real-world implications of relations with programs and AI. I'm sad we didn't get Garrett Hedlund or Olivia Wilde in this, but perhaps there's room in yet another installment for more familiar faces. Tron may be many things -- not least of which is simply uninteresting to many people -- but for those who willingly let it take its course, a deeply satisfying experience of cerebral and surprisingly emotional spectacle await. The dialogue is messy, and rarely works in any of these films; the plot is convoluted and fanciful. Yet the ideas are really smart, and the films work because of the dedication and thoughtfulness of their performers as well as the devastatingly delicious awe of sound and image so effectively combined. Ronning has severely disappointed me before, but his work here is remarkable and truly special.