by Hudson Moura
Tron: Ares returns to the franchise’s neon metaphysics with a premise that ought to feel timely: a world edging toward an AI-managed future, a creator (Dillinger) birthing an entity (Ares, played—and produced—by Jared Leto), and a porous boundary between code and conscience. On paper, the film is ideally matched to IMAX: its production design favors monumental geometry, volumetric light, and precision-machined sets that read beautifully at scale. On screen, though, the experience is more ambivalent—technically polished yet thematically underfed.
Rønning shoots Vancouver as both backlot and blueprint. For locals, the city’s reconfigured angles—glass canyons, elevated arteries, winter pall—have a charge; as geography, it grounds a franchise that often risks floating in abstraction. The best passages leverage this physicality: chases that exploit verticality, gridlines that echo the Tron iconography without walling the film inside it. Yet when the action shifts deeper into the digital—a realm this series should own—the imagery paradoxically feels less astonishing. The problem isn’t execution (the VFX are clean and consistent) but novelty: photoreal digitality is now mainstream; what stuns, today, is the imaginative retexturing of the real. Here, the Grid’s look seldom evolves beyond franchise comfort.
Performance becomes the hinge, and it doesn’t quite lock. Leto’s Ares is strikingly human—warm-eyed, charismatic, even ingratiating. That choice creates immediate rapport but blurs the film’s philosophical edge: if the putative machine consciousness arrives already coded as approachable, the drama of becoming (learning, erring, developing empathy) is abbreviated at the start. Is that a strategic miscalculation from the actor, the director, or both? The role seems designed to wrestle with personhood. The portrayal often affirms it by default. Greta Lee, for her part, gives the film its steadiest pulse—precise, reactive, and capable of turning exposition into stakes—but she’s too often asked to shuttle plot rather than embody its contradictions.
The script circles the genre’s perennial anxieties—control ceded to systems, creators usurped by creations, machine “villainy” as the wages of human design—without interrogating them anew. The familiar beat in which an AI evolves empathy is present and, in outline, defensible (if we build in our image, we inherit our ambivalence). But the film rarely stages that turn as an argument; it happens as a narrative convenience, not a conceptual breakthrough. Likewise, the “machines seize control” arc repeats with limited complication—there are gestures toward governance and accountability, yet little sense of how institutions (or ordinary people) are transformed by coexistence with sentient code. For a franchise predicated on the ethics of embodiment inside computational spaces, these are missed opportunities.
Formally, Rønning favors spectacle-first legibility—a virtue in IMAX, where composition must read in a glance. Cuts arrive at decision points; action grammar is clear; a few large-format vistas genuinely hum. But dialogue is repeatedly subordinated to design: lines needed to clarify stakes are mixed or staged as texture, becoming audiovisual ornament more than narrative sinew. The result is an intermittently less intelligible story than its ideas require, especially for viewers not steeped in Tron lore.
None of this makes Tron: Ares a failure. As a piece of big-platform sci-fi, it’s handsome, propulsive in stretches, and intermittently reflective. It just feels conceptually cautious where it might have been radical. The film is most alive in the tension between a tangible city and an increasingly generic digital sublime; it is least alive where its AI parable defaults to trope. For a series that once turned the inside of a computer into a frontier myth, that’s an ironic fate: a new installment with plenty of circuitry, but fewer sparks than the moment demands. Visually disciplined and IMAX-ready, intriguingly sited in a real city, but thematically underdeveloped—an elegant upgrade that leaves the operating system largely unchanged. 
Rating: 3/5