Review
A beautiful machine with nothing inside it.
Joachim Rønning’s Tron: Ares, the third film in Disney’s series about the world inside the computer, looks superb and has almost nothing to say about the subject it was built for.
Written by CONTROL
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The first Tron, in 1982, imagined software as people and a computer as a place you could be trapped inside. It was clumsy and it was prophetic. Four decades later the question it raised has become the ordinary condition of anyone with a phone, and Tron: Ares, released in October 2025, had a real chance to take it seriously. It chose to reverse the premise instead. This time the program comes out into our world.
Jared Leto plays Ares, a combat program built by Dillinger Systems, whose young chief executive, Julian Dillinger, is played by Evan Peters with a nervous, underfed menace. Dillinger can print programs and weapons into physical reality, but everything he makes collapses after twenty-nine minutes. His rival, Eve Kim of ENCOM, played by Greta Lee, finds the code that would make such creations permanent, and Ares is sent to take it. Instead, having spent some time among people, he begins to wonder whether he wants to follow orders at all.
A program that wants a will
That is a good idea for a film about control, and the picture has no interest in exploring it. Ares’s awakening happens in a few glances and one conversation, and Leto plays the machine and the newly human man with the same distant calm, so the change is announced rather than felt. Lee, a gifted actress, is given grief and exposition and little else. The one sequence with real feeling involves an older face from the series, and it works almost entirely on nostalgia.
The part that works
The look and the sound are another matter. The light cycles tearing through a city at night, trailing walls of red light that solidify behind them, are thrilling, and the design keeps the series’ austere geometry while making it heavier and more physical. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, recording as Nine Inch Nails, supply a pounding electronic score that gives the film most of its pulse. In a large theater, the first half hour is a real sensory event.
The audience noticed the difference. Against a reported budget of roughly $180 million or more, the film took in about $142 million worldwide, and it was widely counted as a disappointment. The failure is not the premise, which remains one of the richest in popular film, but the timidity with which it was treated.
The verdict: Stream it on the biggest screen and the loudest speakers in the house, and skip it otherwise. The 1982 original, for all its creaks, still has more to say about who is in control of whom.