They finally made a really good Tron movie.

Low bar, but even without that it was a lot of fun.

All right peeps, you know the score: it’s been mostly sequels and reboots and stuff for a heck of a long time, and many of those have been bad or underwhelming cash grabs.

Tron is a curious anomaly though. The original came out in 1982 and it’s really only remembered for its visuals, which were extremely unique at the time. If you’ve tried to sit through the whole movie since then, you know it’s boring as heck. Nevertheless it enjoyed cult status for decades, and the studio played around with the idea of a sequel for a long time.

28 years later they made Tron: Legacy, bringing back the heavy hitters in that main cast. As I’ve said before, you can tell they didn’t know whether to make a sequel, reboot, or remake, so they kind of did all three. The result is a story that is 90% identical to the original, just with upgraded graphics and a more meaningful ending.

Like the first movie, it found cult status and there was always interest in a sequel, but this one fell down the ladder and into development hell for a long time. Names were attached and then unattached. Scripts changed. Titles changed. Finally they hunkered down and got serious about it, and the result is 2025’s Tron: Ares.

With movies getting better in the last couple of years, I had hopes for this one. I didn’t get out to see it on opening weekend because I was camping, so I took my boys this afternoon. A few of my friends had already seen it and described it as “meh” but I’m rapidly approaching the conclusion that they just don’t like movies.

Anyway, here’s my breakdown and analysis. Remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel, buy one of my books (FOSSIL FORCE is out 10/29), and sub to the Stack.

Plot

The first two movies established technology that can send a human being from our world into the digitized realm of computers, aka “The Grid.” Since they’re the same story, the plot focused on a guy who accidentally got translated onto The Grid and had to find his way out.

Ares is about the main company, ENCOM, and their rival, Dillinger Systems, both trying to solve the same problem: they each have their own grid, and they each have the ability to translate things from there out into the real world, but the items that come here don’t last longer than half an hour. Whoever solves that problem can fix just about anything.

Dillinger, now run by the grandson of the first movie’s villain, has written a security program called Ares, running him through several iterations to make him the strongest piece of the Master Control Program. The goal is to send Ares into ENCOM’s grid and steal information that will allow his programs to stay in the real world permanently. ENCOM is working on this same problem.

Since ENCOM is good, they want to use this technology to solve world hunger and disease, while Dillinger wants to 3D-print AI bots for the military—bots that can never really die, you just hit the respawn button and bring them back.

The twist is this: AI in movies always tend to go rogue and try to kill humanity. ENCOM’s CEO thinks that the aberration could just as easily be benevolence, and this happens to Ares: he realizes he doesn’t like being expendable, and in his development he realizes he can choose benevolence over what Dillinger wants. He’s so advanced that he starts to feel things he can’t quantify, and decides like Pinnocchio that he wants to be a real boy. He rebels against Dillinger and teams up with ENCOM to try to solve the permanence problem.

Dillinger is driven not to lose, so their CEO sends Ares’ successor Athena after him, and what ensues is heavy on action as well as exploration of the idea of what makes life worth living.

Cast

Jared Leto is the eponymous Ares. I’ve seen him in a few things before and was never really impressed (his 2015 Joker was dumb) but man, he really killed it in this role. There’s a presence that this character needs to pull off and I like the way he executed it, showing his growth gradually throughout the film. Several times he delivered a cold line and I was like Hell yeah, nice.

The ENCOM protagonists are kind of a mixed bag and I don’t know any of the actors. Eve is the CEO, she and her sister Tess replaced Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) who didn’t return from the second movie. (We’re told in an exposition prologue that he stepped away from the company, and there’s no word of what happened with Olivia Wilde’s Quorra.)

Tess died of a brain tumor so Eve took over to try to find the permanence code. Seth is the plucky comic relief who helps her out, and they also have a guy named Ajay on their side…they were all fine, no real complaints, they didn’t resonate with me all that much either, they fulfilled their purpose in the story. There weren’t any dumb Marvel jokes and they all worked together nicely. I think Eve’s story was decently impactful because her sister died of a glioblastoma, which we’ve dealt with in my family, so hey.

The Dillinger antagonists were also a bit of a mixed bag, but done well. Evan Peters plays Julian Dillinger, and Gillian Anderson of the X-Files played his mom, Elizabeth. She was the CEO of the company after her father, whose name I forget, but he was the main baddie in the original Tron. Julian Dillinger is your average cocaine-fueled megalomaniac Los Angeles tech billionaire, and he plays the role well. He also had a lot of cool tattoos that looked like circuitry and stuff on his arms and neck, that was a nice touch. And the actress who played Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith?) did a convincing job as a baddie. She basically has superpowers when she’s in the real world but she still struggles and like Leto, she sells that well.

Series Continuity

The writers and director chose wisely and acknowledged the previous material without relying too heavily on it, or calling back to it all the time. Obviously people still want to know what happened to Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who never returned from the Grid, and he does pop up for a few scenes in the third act. Ares gets to visit the original Grid 1.0 from 1982, and for good reason. His conversation with Flynn was a fantastic turning point for his character—he tries to explain what he likes about Depeche Mode’s music, for example, and at first he starts listing technical elements of it, until finally he realizes he can’t put it into words. It’s just a feeling. That’s when he realizes he’s exceeded the potential of his programming.

The first two movies explored the technological idea of going into the Grid. Here they explored the idea of leaving it, and I think they managed to pull some nice nuggets out of the ether with their conclusions, no pun intended.

There’s room for a sequel, as you might expect, and if they do a fourth one, I have two hopes:

First, bring Flynn out of the Grid. Bring Sam and Quorra back and conclude their story. And for heaven’s sake, get Tron himself (Bruce Boxleitner) back somehow.

Second, conclude the story. Give this world an ending, and don’t wait another 15-20 years to do it. Garrett Hedlund is my age and Jared Leto is in his 50s. Jeff Bridges won’t be around by then. They took a boring original, punched up the visuals and the score for the sequel, and truly elevated it with the third piece in a trilogy. Land this beast with a triumphant fourth installment and give it the happy ending it deserves.

After all, there’s a mid-credits scene (no spoilers) that sets up a final villain worth taking on. Just gotta have the right idea for it.

Cool Tidbits

The visuals here are AWESOME. You’re not just getting new versions of Light Cycles and whatever the heck those spaceships are called. Gliders, trucks, hand-to-hand light weapons, a jet ski submarine thing…there are some EXCELLENT tech designs in Ares and I could just stare at them for another two hours, watching how they move and how the details all work. Just fantastic.

I don’t want to dig through the Internet for all of this, so I’m only going to list one thing that I noticed myself in the ending credits: there’s a scene in the third act (you’ve seen it on trailers) where a pair of F-35s fly in to fight Dillinger machines in Los Angeles. The two pilots are Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the leading men in Nine Inch Nails, who scored this movie.

And the score was really cool. I’m actually glad they didn’t bring back Daft Punk (I know they’re broken up). The Legacy score was its own great piece and it’s good to let it stand. NIN introduced a new soundscape that was consistent with the synth feel of DP, but gave Ares its own audio character.

Content

Mild PG-13 profanity, maybe an S-bomb here or there, a G-D word, nothing overly prevalent. A woman gets stabbed in the stomach in act 3 (you’ll see it coming) and other than that, not much. There’s no sex or anything, no romantic subplot (which, considering that it’s Disney, is for the best these days).

Conclusion

Go check it out. I recommend watching Legacy beforehand, but not the original Tron unless you’re having trouble falling asleep. This was a fun, cool movie with a lot of really great moments and a story that actually shows the effort put into it. I like that.

Drive safe, see you out there.