Tron: Ares Uploads Ambition, Deletes Emotion

Tron: Ares

★ ★ ½

Tron: Ares, the latest in Disney’s neon-lit series, once again zaps users into The Grid—a sleek, digital battleground where light trails and nostalgia collide. It’s the second sequel and we’re familiar with the premise—yet we’re given a convoluted, confusing opening that dumps flashbacks on what’s happened since Tron: Legacy. From the start, that backstory acts like a boat anchor—dragging the film down even when the action finally kicks in.

Ares centers on two AI-based companies competing to turn digital assets into physical ones. Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) has taken the reins of his mother Elisabeth’s (Gillian Anderson) company, Dillinger Systems. He’s after government contracts and wants to bring the soldiers and war machines from The Grid to the real world. He uses laser technology to materialize digital creations in the real world. It’s a feat that impresses several generals as he shows off a new soldier he’s created in The Grid—Ares (Jared Leto). He even materializes a video game battle tank for good measure.

Jared Leto as Ares
© 2025 Walt Disney Pictures

But after 29 minutes—a time stamp the film won’t let us forget—those digital imports from The Grid start to crumble in our reality.

ENCOM is a competing company led by CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee). As the film opens, she and her team are in Alaska where a lot of assets from the 1982 Tron are stored. She tries out floppy disks in old computers in search of something called “the permanence code.” ENCOM wants to bring creations into the world that could tackle problems like world hunger. Their more successful iteration is to create an orange tree. That missing code, resembling a DNA double helix, is the key to keeping their creations stable.

As you can guess from the name, the permanence code would solve Julian’s problems. Real-world espionage and sabotage take place in both our world and The Grid as characters get zapped between both worlds.

Greta Lee as Eve Kim
© 2025 Walt Disney Pictures

Meanwhile, Ares has had a taste of our world and wants to know what it would be like to actually be human. Of course, the film directly references Pinocchio—a clever nod that deserves more emotional weight than it gets. The real story should belong to Ares, but he’s sidelined by the corporate tug-of-war between Eve and Julian leaving us without a strong narrative thread to hang our interest on.

The story never feels confident in its direction and the filmmakers seem unsure how to tell it. It’s a case of trying to do too much in one film, failing to give us characters we can fully invest in. At times, the screenplay feels as if story ingredients were haphazardly thrown together, tossed into a shaker, and dumped on the carpet to see what “choose-your-own-adventure” fate has bestowed us.

Gillian Anderson as Elisabeth and Evan Peters as Julian
© 2025 Walt Disney Pictures

Still, the film flashes moments of genuine excitement. The visual effects are neat, and the action, when it gets going, is as engaging as it can be in a film like this. Inside The Grid, vehicles leave glowing light ribbons in their wake—neon barriers that shatter anything crossing their path. Ares shows us what that might look like in the real world, and that’s where this film is at its most fun.

Tron vehicles in our world would have landed harder if paired with stronger storytelling and deeper character arcs.

Jodie Turner-Smith as Athena
© 2025 Walt Disney Pictures

I kept wishing Leto had more to work with. There’s a certain comedic timing that works in his performance—a digitized Indiana Jones of sorts. As he thaws from a cold, digital creature at Dillinger Corporation’s beck-and-call, the humanity in his performance could have made Ares someone for us to really root for. It’s a script of missed opportunities.

In the end, Ares shows us nothing new. We’ve seen concepts like this before. What we’re given is a sequel made for the sake of having a sequel. It’s like they didn’t know what it should be about so they just flipped the script on the series to bring digital video game assets to the real world. For a story about bridging two worlds, Ares never quite connects on its own. It could’ve worked, maybe someone from The Grid would have written it better.