TRON: Ares

The Ghost in the Machine is Still Loading

Every era gets the *TRON* movie that fits its mood. In 1982, that meant a neon arcade myth where the inside of a computer felt practically divine. In 2010, *TRON: Legacy* turned inward, all Daft Punk and melancholy about fathers and legacy. Now, after fifteen years, there is *TRON: Ares*. Joachim Rønning—one of Disney’s reliable hands for huge, carefully managed blockbusters like the fifth *Pirates of the Caribbean*—arrives at exactly the moment AI has stopped being sci-fi wallpaper and become daily corporate dread. I’m not convinced the movie knows how to grapple with that dread, but I was fascinated by the way it makes it look.



This time the geometry flips. Instead of a human being dragged into the digital Grid, an AI enforcer named Ares (Jared Leto) gets pushed into our physical world by a brutal tech CEO (Evan Peters, leaning hard into unstable tech-bro energy). Rønning shoots it with an icy industrial sleekness. The camera doesn’t float so much as stalk these razor-clean spaces and giant light-skimmer chases that leave six-foot walls of hard light behind them. Still, the movie’s greatest piece of architecture isn’t visual. It’s sonic. Nine Inch Nails supplies a score that feels like a metal nervous system threaded through the whole film. Mashable's Kristy Puchko called the movie "heavy-handed, dunderheaded, and over earnest," yet still argued the NIN soundtrack makes it worth seeing big. No argument here. When those synths drop, your chest knows before your brain does.



There is one scene that briefly suggests the movie might bridge spectacle and feeling. Ares, newly embodied in the real world, walks outside and gets caught in rain for the first time. The soundtrack falls away. All you hear is the tiny, precise patter of water on that plastic-smooth skin. Rønning moves in close as a single drop traces down his face, no longer registering as data but as weight. It’s small, tactile, unexpectedly intimate. If the rest of the film had trusted silence like that, we might be talking about something richer.



The problem is still the man in the rain. Leto, after years of meme-heavy method-acting disasters (*Morbius* refuses to die as a cultural ghost), takes a quieter approach here with an AI learning to become a "real boy." But quiet drifts into inert. He gives Ares a stiff blankness that makes him hard to hold onto as a protagonist. You can see what the script wants—a machine waking up to feeling—yet Leto’s rigid posture and unblinking stare rarely suggest much is changing inside. Greta Lee, playing a compassionate rival tech executive, walks off with every scrap of human texture in the movie. Just watch her shoulders: they carry the exhaustion of being the lone adult in a room full of reckless men. She makes the grand philosophical chatter feel briefly connected to something lived.

So *TRON: Ares* ends up as a striking contradiction. It’s obsessed with the possibility of software growing a soul, while never quite locating one of its own. Rønning has made a gorgeous, bleak blockbuster that often looks like the world’s most expensive screen saver—full of good questions about personhood and permanence, thin on anything emotionally satisfying in return. Whether that reads as failure or feature probably depends on how happy you are to take style in place of depth. I left the theater buzzing from the bass, dazzled by the light, and weirdly untouched.