Tron: Ares pulses with the welt of impermanence. It’s a film encoded with longing in this battle between digital perfection and human frailty.
Joachim Rønning directs this version with a colder, more procedural hand. There is none of the fevered polish of Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy. Ronning favors function over flourish. And yet, the film lives beautifully in his digital world —a world where the neon bleed of memory and ambition leaks from the edges.
The title character, Ares, is played by Jared Leto. He is a creation of hubris, 3D printed into being by Julian Dillinger. Dillinger is one of Tron: Ares’ two boy-kings of biotech. Dillinger has the lesser firewall. His cravings for legacy often overwhelm his ethics and morals.
Ares is not a hero in the beginning. He is the tool, the ghost in the machine —a security protocol made flesh. Ares is sent forth into the world to find the permanence code- something that can allow the revision of added life to his designed twenty-nine-minute life span. The code is buried somewhere in Eve Kim’s grieving humanity.
Ares will eventually start questioning what his programming allows him to do. He is not hard-wired with a Pinocchio complex, but rather the realization that humanity itself is a virus of paradox —a system that cannot be debugged.
Eve (Greta Lee) is the movie’s soul, even when the script occasionally neglects to provide her with one. She is a woman tortured by her sister’s death, and determined to employ the ENCOM particle laser to restore her sister’s breath to the planet it was stolen from. Her subplot is a mute rebuke of techno-utopianism, the notion that global collapse can be reversed with enough code and clean design. It is a critique of the vain idea that hope can be controverted.
On the opposite side is. Julian and his cloning fixation — the compulsion to mass-produce Ares and unleash obedient avatars upon the world. It is a darker mirror, a biotech fever dream in which identity is simply replication and legacy is sheer control.
The title, Tron: Ares, announces itself in rupture. Ares is a warning, a war god as program, a digital creature that heralds the end of distinction between code and meat. It reverses the franchise’s primary dynamic: not humans falling into the Grid, but the Grid being layered on top of the world.
Downtown Vancouver serves as the new playing field. The orange “ribbons of light” that slash through the streets are invasive, viral, alive. Those lights are where the film works. It demands a belief in technological magic. It commands a fear of permanence. The permanence code turns out to be a trap. Salvation here is the promise paradox — nothing will ever die when everything should. The digital beings of the movie dominate through through their presence. They linger, replicate, refuse to fade.
Still, Tron: Ares is pretty much plug-and-play. Its mythos is squashed in the footnotes. Jeff Bridges exists as a spirit. The film merely name-checks him. It has too many synths that plug through incoherent action moments. The supporting cast flits in and out, files waiting to be swatted. At times, it is loud, propulsive, and often emotionally frigid.
Yet, there is something in Leto’s performance that hangs around. His Ares is a hybrid question mark that exists between machine and human, and wants to be neither. He learns to mourn, hesitate, and protect. Those are the moments when Tron Ares comes to life in its loneliness, recognizing that impermanence is an offering. The movie is a mutation that reprograms the series code. It keeps the permanence that remains.
Grade: B+
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