The year is 2025. An entertainment industrial complex once riding high on a new generation of bankable stars and fresh IP now faces increasing decline and desperation as it strip-mines what remains of its old energy reserves. Enter Tron: Ares, a fall blockbuster that seems to exist entirely to breathe new life into an old franchise and that accidentally commits the company’s latest act of stomach-turning necromancy instead. The first wave of reviews is in, and it does not paint a very flattering picture of Jared Leto’s latest vessel for renewed relevance.
Tron: Ares (2025) is a sequel to Tron: Legacy (2010) which was a follow-up to the original Tron (1982). It features Leto as the titular Ares, an advanced program sent by a defense contractor into the real world to attack a gaming company in a race to perfect a technology that can make digital objects exist in real life. Leto is essentially a Fortnite skin come to life fighting in a live-service turf war between competing metaverses, except eventually he joins the side of the good guys, including Jeff Bridges and his son. Gillian Anderson is also in this one.
Forces within Hollywood have been trying to make this movie for a while. Leto was reportedly central to finally making it happen. It was directed by Joachim Rønning, best known for the seminal 2019 fairy tale reimagining Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. The results with Tron: Ares, out October 10, probably could have been a lot worse, but by all accounts, they still aren’t great.
“There is no drama or jeopardy or human interest anywhere,” writes Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian. “This franchise now looks about as urgently contemporary as an in-car CD player.” Alison Willmore was not much more impressed at Vulture. “Rønning does get his own kick-ass score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, all ominous throbbing, but can’t come up with anything visually distinctive,” she wrote.
IGN considered the movie mid overall but adored the soundtrack. “Tron: Ares is getting a 5. And honestly, I bumped it up from a 4 just because of Nine Inch Nails,” wrote Clint Gage. Gamesradar gave the movie 2.5 stars out of five, dinging it in part for Leto’s performance, with Emily Garbutt calling him “thoroughly unconvincing as AI-with-a-heart Ares.”
Polygon was let down by what critic Samantha Nelson saw as the paint-by-numbers storytelling, though she found the overall vibes more entertaining. “The Daft Punk soundtrack was the best part of Tron: Legacy, and the Nine Inch Nails album written for Tron: Ares similarly elevates even lackluster scenes,” writes Nelson. “There are haunting sequences that evoke Vangelis’ Blade Runner score and more propulsive tracks that perfectly complement the fast-paced action.”
And not everyone found Leto so ill-suited to the role, though whether or not that’s a good thing is up for debate. “Leto’s performance works because he’s so utterly believable as a soulless ghoul that it’s easy to buy into the happy-to-be-here warmth of his emergent humanity,” writes David Ehrlich for IndieWire. “Sure, the movie’s idea of “emergent humanity” is limited to Ares’ deep appreciation for Depeche Mode (who the security program rightly appraises as being superior to Mozart), but these days that’s more humanity than a lot of people could ever hope to muster.”
Variety‘s Peter Debruge ultimately blames former Disney studio exec Sean Bailey for the ambitious misfire. “As president of production at Disney, Bailey effectively pillaged the company’s back catalog (he was responsible for so many of those live-action remakes, franchise reboots and theme park adaptations),” he writes. “While it was exciting to see what Tron might look like in the 21st century, the brand gets in the way of Ares’ internal evolution…there’s a sense that Tron: Ares has too much nostalgia to service, from the cobwebby re-creation of Flynn’s arcade-basement office to Bridges’ extended cameo (as a drawling, laid-back Dude who sounds less like Flynn than his Big Lebowski character).”
A parody news post claiming Leto had sex with AI to prepare for the movie spread on social media yesterday. It was false, obviously, but maybe Tron: Ares would have turned out more interesting if he actually had.
