Review - Tron: Ares (2025)

Rating: 5/10

I saw Tron: Ares in ScreenX, the format where the film plays across three screens instead of one, wrapping the projection around the side walls of the auditorium. It looked incredible. The peripheral vision does real work, and you get a genuine sense of depth and enclosure that a flat screen can't give you. For a film like this one, built almost entirely on light and geometry, it's the perfect way to watch it.

That is not a small compliment. It is also, more or less, the whole compliment.

The visuals and the music are doing everything

Tron: Ares is visually stunning. That's never been in question with this franchise, and Jeff Cronenweth shoots the light cycles, the grids and the red-tinted incursions into the real world with real confidence. Every frame is designed within an inch of its life.

And the soundtrack, produced entirely by Nine Inch Nails, absolutely fits the aesthetic. Reznor and Ross were the obvious call after Daft Punk set the bar on Legacy, and they don't try to compete with that score so much as bulldoze past it. It's harder, colder and nastier, and it's the best thing in the movie by a comfortable margin.

Basically everything I liked about Tron: Ares happened either on the screen or in the speakers. Very little of it happened in the story.

Evan Peters and Gillian Anderson are the only humans here

Evan Peters and Gillian Anderson are fantastic, which at this point is just what they do. Peters plays the corporate heir with the exact right amount of smugness and insecurity, and Anderson brings so much weight to her scenes that you briefly forget how thin the material is. Whenever either of them is on screen, the film has a pulse.

Then there's Jared Leto, playing an AI that malfunctions. No emotion whatsoever across the entire runtime. The same stoic face from the first frame to the last. I understand the character is supposed to be a program slowly discovering something like feeling, but there is a difference between playing blankness and simply being blank, and this lands firmly on the wrong side of it. Even Morbius gave him more to work with.

The script is rough

And it is rough. There is an actual line of dialogue in this film that goes: "Are you going to make a real boy out of this Pinocchio?" Somebody wrote that, somebody approved it, and somebody said it out loud on a soundstage.

There's also one chaotic sequence in the back half where the scale escalates so absurdly that I genuinely expected Godzilla to walk into frame and end the argument. The film keeps reaching for grandeur it hasn't earned, and every time it does, the seams show.

The bones of a good idea are in here. AI stepping out of the grid and into the physical world is a premise with real teeth in 2025. The screenplay just isn't interested in doing anything with it beyond arranging some very handsome set-pieces.

The verdict

Tron: Ares is a light show with a great soundtrack and almost nothing underneath. A generous 5/10, purely for the visuals and the music. They mentioned Depeche Mode.