Review Roundup: Joachim Rønning’s Tron: Ares
I’m not convinced we needed another Tron movie, especially this long after 2010’s middling Tron: Legacy, which boasted some incredible visuals but a rather hohum storyline. But here we are in 2025, and Tron: Ares is emerging from the grid courtesy of director Joachim Rønning (Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales).
This time around, Jared Leto plays Ares, a sophisticated program brought into the real world on a secret mission. And naturally, the arrival of a walking, talking AI has some pretty big ramifications for humanity. The film also stars Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, and Gillian Anderson. Jeff Bridges also reprises his role as Kevin Flynn, who previously died in Tron: Legacy, but given that Tron: Ares is a franchise reboot, no other Tron alumni are slated to appear.
So does Tron: Ares add anything to the influential sci-fi franchise? Or is it just so much flashy CGI spectacle? And just how well does the Nine Inch Nail soundtrack work for all of the cybernetic action? Read on for a selection of critical reactions to the movie.
The propulsive new sequel, coming 15 years after Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy, and 43 years after the 1982 classic that started it all, is a very particular kind of modern cinematic beast. Director Joachim Rønning aims to please longtime fans. He aims to do something new with the franchise. And, it seems, Tron: Ares has a mind of its own, striving to be a modern blockbuster for normies that has something deep to say about artificial intelligence and our need to value the finite nature of life. Technically, the movie accomplishes all of these things, and it does so while being an in-your-face, action-packed thrill ride that doesn’t have a lot of time for nuance.
Tron: Ares certainly isn’t the worst film I’ve seen this year, but it’s one of the weirdest in that it actively resists accepting what makes the series so fun when it’s at its best. I’m not opposed to nostalgia cash grabs, I just prefer them to understand what we have nostalgia for.
The matrix of pointlessness is reloaded in this mind-bendingly dull sci-fi, more a screensaver than an actual film. It’s a threequel to the original movie Tron from 1982, a film that was mould-breaking and boldly pioneering for its day in a way that eludes this one and its predecessor Tron Legacy from 2010.
If Nine Inch Nails emerges as the true hero of Tron: Ares, it’s because their electrifying score supplies what the screenplay cannot: momentum, pulse, and rhythm. The music’s industrial heartbeat, paired with the film’s kaleidoscopic IMAX visuals, turns the experience into a sensory amusement ride. The problem is that’s all it is. The movie’s attempts to probe mortality and consciousness collapse under their own synthetic weight, evoking laughter when aiming for profundity.
Here’s a novel scenario: the year’s best score was written for the year’s worst film. It creates, in turn, a kind of inescapable, torturous psychic loop: the brain starts to stall as each technobabble line of dialogue and drab narrative turn of Tron: Ares enters the processing centres, only for it to be periodically zapped back into consciousness when a new track by rock outfit Nine Inch Nails starts vibrating the butt cheeks. From despair to euphoria, despair to euphoria, on and on.
Those first two Tron films were, of course, also Disney movies but were made with enough technological advancement that they didn’t quite feel that way. They felt a little edgy. A little cooler. Tron: Ares is certainly cool, but in no way edgy. It’s familiar, safe, and formulaic in very Disney ways that make it work overall, but that also means it never wows or surprises you too significantly.
[A]fter I realized the movie wasn’t getting better from a narrative or logical perspective, I sat back and soaked in the visual grandeur of director Joachim Rønning, who surely deserves a prize for maintaining his sanity in the middle of so much computer-generated insanity.
Steven Lisberger’s 1982 film Tron was groundbreaking for its use of CGI and focus on video gaming, inspiring a host of imitators with its blend of mysticism, wild visuals, and anxiety about artificial intelligence. Joseph Kosinski’s 2010 sequel Tron: Legacy clumsily doubled down on the mysticism and pushed the boundaries of CGI further than they were ready to go by de-aging Tron star Jeff Bridges. The CGI in Joachim Rønning’s Tron: Ares looks better than anything the franchise has done before, but the script from Jesse Wigutow just reuses story beats and themes from the past two films.
As a narrative, it rockets a bunch of flat characters through a dopey, butt-simple story. But as a feature-length music video for the Nine Inch Nails score that plays more or less from Tron: Ares’ first frame to its last (with a memorable break for a Depeche Mode track), it’s incredibly effective, fusing Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s music to carefully choreographed action and cutting-edge special effects.
[U]nlike Legacy, which felt like a tech-forward theme park ride, Ares is an uninspired soft reboot that spends much of its time overexplaining a plot that’s as convoluted as it is predictable. Despite having a surprisingly stacked cast (and one very questionable lead performance), the movie doesn’t really know what to do with any of its stars beyond putting them in slick suits and using them to set up another sequel that doesn’t exactly feel like it will or should come to fruition.
[S]pectacularly designed, swiftly paced, thoughtfully written (by Jesse Wigutow, from a story by himself and David Digilio), and directed (by Joachim Rønning) within an inch of its neon-hued life. The techno score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross adds to the film’s grandeur and imbues it with a philosophical, questioning undertone that is often intriguingly at odds with its kinetic transitions and geometry-fracturing action set-pieces. The sum total is a rave of a movie that acts as its own hallucinogen, and that is best experienced on a huge screen with a state-of-the-art sound system.
Tron: Areas opens in theaters on October 10, 2025. Watch the trailer below.
