Tron: Ares Review — Jared Leto, Greta Lee, and Nine Inch Nails Electrify a Rebooted Digital Frontier

More than forty years after Disney first invited audiences into the glowing neon maze of Tron, the franchise returns with a vengeance. Tron: Ares injects new voltage into the cybernetic saga, merging human emotion with digital spectacle in a sleek, high-octane sequel that finally finds the pulse its predecessors often lacked.

Director Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) takes the helm this time, guiding a cast led by Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Gillian Anderson, and returning legacy star Jeff Bridges. The result is a surprisingly soulful and visually muscular sci-fi blockbuster — one driven as much by heart as by hard drives.

The Premise: Humans, Programs, and the Blurring of Lines

In the decades since the events of Tron: Legacy, the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds have thinned almost beyond recognition. Tech giant ENCOM, the corporation at the center of the series since the beginning, has undergone a major image overhaul — no longer the shady monolith it once was, but now the beacon of ethical innovation under new leadership. Its CEO, Eve Kim (Greta Lee), carries both ambition and grief, driven by her late sister’s dream to perfect the “permanence code” — a breakthrough that could allow digital entities to exist indefinitely without deteriorating.

Standing in opposition is Dillinger Systems, a rival tech empire led by Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of the original film’s notorious villain. Julian’s ambitions go well beyond market dominance: he wants to weaponize artificial intelligence, building an army of sentient programs capable of serving as immortal soldiers.

Among them is Ares (Jared Leto), a humanoid AI program engineered to obey Julian without question. Programmed to protect “the grid” — the luminous virtual world where code becomes consciousness — Ares is both soldier and slave. But when he begins to experience empathy and doubt, his creator’s control begins to fracture. His crisis of conscience sets off a chain reaction that tears down the firewall between human and digital life, with catastrophic consequences for both.

An Unexpectedly Human Core

Tron: Ares may overflow with neon circuitry and impossible architecture, but what gives it real charge is its humanity. Leto, often accused of overplaying eccentricity, delivers one of his most grounded performances in years. His Ares is thoughtful, curious, even quietly funny — a sentient being torn between loyalty and conscience. Instead of the smug cyber-god one might expect, Leto gives us a reluctant warrior with the soul of a philosopher.

His chemistry with Greta Lee’s Eve Kim is the film’s emotional center. Lee, so magnetic in Past Lives, brings intelligence and tenderness to a character who might easily have been written as a cold technocrat. Their partnership evolves from wary alliance to mutual respect, bound by shared loneliness and the question that haunts every version of Tron: where does the human end and the program begin?

Rønning and screenwriter Jesse Wigutow smartly build on that theme without drowning in exposition. The story nods to the ideas of Blade Runner, Ex Machina, and The Matrix — the usual comparisons are inevitable — but it filters them through Tron’s distinctive visual and moral lens. The result feels like an evolution rather than a rehash.

Ares vs. Athena: Digital Gods at War

Every great sci-fi action film needs a worthy adversary, and Tron: Ares finds one in Athena, played by the striking Jodie Turner-Smith. As Ares’ second-in-command, Athena begins as the loyal enforcer but quickly becomes the story’s real menace — a sentient program who takes “by any means necessary” to terrifying extremes. When Ares defies Julian’s command to delete Eve and instead helps her escape, Athena steps out from her master’s shadow and becomes an unrestrained force of annihilation.

Her scenes — particularly a ferocious aerial battle aboard a massive Recognizer aircraft — inject the film with the kind of danger and chaos that the earlier Tron entries sometimes lacked. Turner-Smith’s presence is icy, elegant, and magnetic, her glam-rock aesthetic giving the character an edge that feels ripped from a cyberpunk fever dream.

Legacy and Lineage

Fans of the franchise will be pleased to see Jeff Bridges reprise his role as Kevin Flynn, the original creator who vanished into the grid decades ago. This time, mercifully, there’s no awkward digital de-aging — Bridges appears as himself, weathered and wise, his brief screen time delivering an emotional anchor for the film’s big ideas. His conversation with Leto’s Ares — a meeting between creator and creation — is easily one of the movie’s best scenes. It’s filled with warmth, wry humor, and a sense of cosmic wonder.

Bridges’ Flynn marvels at how close the digital and human worlds have grown, his awe tinged with the quiet terror of a man realizing he may have opened a door that can never be closed. It’s a graceful passing of the torch, not through nostalgia, but through mutual recognition.

The Music: Industrial Power Meets Digital Pulse

If Tron: Legacy was defined by Daft Punk’s iconic electronic score, Tron: Ares gets its identity from Nine Inch Nails, credited here under their full band name. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross bring their signature industrial energy — pulsing, distorted, propulsive — to Rønning’s neon apocalypse.

The music isn’t just background; it’s infrastructure. It drives the movie forward, giving even dialogue-heavy scenes a heartbeat. Like their work on The Social Network and Gone Girl, Reznor and Ross use sound to define tension — a mix of analog noise and digital precision that mirrors the movie’s central conflict. The result is one of the most dynamic film scores of the year, perfectly suited to IMAX speakers and subwoofers alike.

A World That Finally Feels Tangible

Visually, Tron: Ares is a revelation compared to its predecessors. Rønning and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (best known for his collaborations with David Fincher) combine physical sets and practical lighting with state-of-the-art digital effects to create a world that feels tactile and immersive.

While Tron: Legacy often looked like a glossy screensaver, Ares embraces grit and imperfection. The glowing lines of the grid have texture now; the vehicles throw sparks instead of pixels. The film’s most exhilarating set piece — a freeway chase between Eve’s motorcycle and two light cycles, each trailing brilliant streams of red and blue light — is both a visual spectacle and a physical thrill. It’s the kind of sequence that reminds you why IMAX exists.

Performances and Tone

The ensemble brings welcome variety. Evan Peters plays Julian Dillinger as a tech-age narcissist — part coder, part cult leader — whose arrogance outpaces his understanding. He’s the perfect modern villain: too clever for his own good. Hasan Minhaj and Arturo Castro add levity as Eve’s pragmatic colleagues at ENCOM, while Gillian Anderson gives the film gravitas as Julian’s calculating mother, a business titan who sees the disaster coming but can’t stop her son’s spiral.

Tonally, Ares finds a balance that has long eluded the franchise: it’s serious without being self-serious, emotionally grounded without losing its sense of awe. The humor, often subtle and character-driven, helps humanize a story that could easily have drowned in jargon and neon.

Tron: Ares doesn’t reinvent science fiction, but it finally makes Tron feel alive again. It’s faster, funnier, and more emotionally engaging than Legacy, with a stronger script and characters who matter beyond their polygons. Rønning’s respect for the mythology is evident, but he’s not shackled by it; his film points forward, not backward.

When the final act teases yet another potential crossover between the grid and the human world, the implications are both thrilling and unsettling. In an era obsessed with artificial intelligence and digital immortality, Tron: Ares feels uncannily timely. It’s a popcorn spectacle that still finds room for questions about what it means to be real — and what we risk when we build gods out of code.

So no, it’s not the next Blade Runner. But as a vibrant, propulsive, and unexpectedly emotional return to a long-dormant universe, Tron: Ares is a download worth making.