<\/p>\n
Joachim R\u00f8nning\u2019s \u201cTron: Ares\u201d is a movie about two warring tech billionaires who have very different intentions for the same revolutionary tech. Both of them are capable of rapidly 3D-printing anything they\u2019re able to design in the digital world, and both of them are in pursuit of the \u201cpermanence code\u201d that will allow their creations to last for more than 29 minutes before crumbling into computer dust. ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (a severely overqualified Greta Lee<\/a>) wants to use her particle laser to create orange trees out of thin air and otherwise replenish the massive environmental resources that such modern tools usurp in the name of progress. Dillinger Systems CEO Julian Dillinger (a bratty Evan Peters<\/a>) wants to use his particle laser to mass produce Jared Leto. You\u2019ll never guess which one of these characters is the villain.<\/p>\n A loud, propulsive, and broadly functional continuation of a franchise that \u2014 while formative to our visual conception of the computer age \u2014 has displayed all the cultural staying power of a laser-printed lightbike, \u201cAres<\/a>\u201d is in pursuit of the same permanence as its characters. It\u2019s a film whose only goal is to make \u201cTron\u201d into a renewable resource in its own right, as opposed to a brand that has to be exhumed from the morgue of half-dead Hollywood IP whenever Disney feels like the tech world has advanced to the point that the Grid seems like a place worth revisiting. If nothing else, \u201cAres\u201d might just be relevant, palatable, and undemanding enough to pull that off.<\/p>\n More from IndieWire<\/strong><\/p>\n Pulling back from the \u201cbio-digital jazz\u201d of 2010\u2019s \u201cTron: Legacy\u201d in favor of a more programmatic approach (as you might expect would result from replacing a hyper-aesthete like Joseph Kosinski with the studio-tested director of \u201cMaleficent: Mistress of Evil\u201d and \u201cPirates of the Caribbean 5\u201d), this safe but stylish follow-up costumes itself in the signature neon graphics of its franchise in order to disguise a generic story that strains to accommodate a few stray bits of the \u201cTron\u201d mythos. Are you at least dimly aware of the fact that Jeff Bridges once played a cool dude named Flynn? Then you\u2019ll have no trouble following the beats of Jesse Wigutow\u2019s script for \u201cAres,\u201d a plug-and-play story about rogue AI and the race for the future which seizes on the fact that audiences no longer need the benefit of lore to appreciate the porousness between real and virtual realms.<\/p>\n The internet notwithstanding, anyone old enough to understand \u201cInside Out\u201d should be able to wrap their head around the idea that Leto is essentially playing an anthropomorphized piece of anti-virus software who exists within ENCOM\u2019s data files. Now that people getting sucked into digital worlds has become the stuff of everyday life, \u201cAres\u201d stays current by inverting the dynamic of the previous \u201cTron\u201d films; with the same glimmer of soon but not quite yet fantasy that animated its predecessors, R\u00f8nning\u2019s installment focuses on digital beings exerting their influence upon our physical reality.<\/p>\n The Grid is out, downtown Vancouver is in. Daft Punk\u2019s chunky electro fuzz has been replaced by Nine Inch Nails\u2019 crunchier industrial synths. Most of all, the wonder of ones and zeroes has been swapped for the too-basic cautionary belief that technology is only as good (or as bad) as the programming we choose to give it.<\/p>\n Like so many films about synths, robots, and artificial intelligence, \u201cAres\u201d is terminally limited by the idea that every machine secretly aspires to be human, which is only interesting so far as it reflects humanity\u2019s seeming determination to become less so. A sniveling hacker sociopath in the mold of Mark Zuckerberg or Boris from \u201cGoldeneye\u201d (some archetypes are desperately in need of a firmware update), Julian is so desperate to make good on his legacy and impress his ex-CEO mom (Gillian Anderson) that he doesn\u2019t care about the consequences of his technology, or that it might not be nice to taunt his new security program as \u201cexpendable.\u201d He doesn\u2019t realize that smelling a few rain drops and watching a firefly land on his finger might be all it takes for a dead-eyed murderbot to start questioning its programming.<\/p>\n Supplanting the video game setting of the previous \u201cTron\u201d movies in favor of a vaguely roguelite story format, the script dispatches Ares \u2014 along with his less impressionable second-in-command Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) \u2014 to the real world on a 29-minute dash to capture Eve and retrieve the permanence code from the recesses of her memory. That hunt makes for a fun motorcycle chase, as R\u00f8nning confidently melds the franchise\u2019s synthwave aesthetic into the stuff of a more realistic setpiece without having to develop a look of his own. (The ribbons of orange light that carve through Vancouver resemble nothing so much as Christo and Jeanne-Claude\u2019s ultimate fever dream, while later action sequences aspire to twist that one visual trick into new shapes.) One glimpse at Eve\u2019s face is enough for Ares to realize that he\u2019s on the wrong side of the fight, and so the rest of the story finds him teaming up with the ENCOM executive to safeguard the permanence code as Julian sends wave after wave of 3D-printed Athenas to kill them both.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to appreciate why Eve has that effect on Ares. Lee is so gifted and complete an actress that she can\u2019t help but feel completely zip-tied by a character as underwritten as the one she plays here (Eve is motivated by the memory of her dead sister, but the movie completely fails to square the fragility of life with the \u201cpermanence\u201d of the code she left behind), but there\u2019s still value in casting a singular performer in a role that amounts to an AI Google summary of a human being. Namely: We accept that she\u2019s able to sell Ares on the existence of the ineffable. He\u2019s never met anyone who clearly had more to them than he could see on the surface, and that goes a long way in a world that\u2019s otherwise populated by the likes of Julian Dillinger and Athena (to say nothing of Hasan Minaj\u2019s two-line role as Eve\u2019s business partner, or Arturo Castro\u2019s comic relief as a guy who\u2019s really into breakfast burritos).<\/p>\n On the other hand, Leto\u2019s performance works because he\u2019s so utterly believable as a soulless ghoul that it\u2019s easy to buy into the happy-to-be-here warmth of his emergent humanity. Sure, the movie\u2019s idea of \u201cemergent humanity\u201d is limited to Ares\u2019 deep appreciation for Depeche Mode (who the security program rightly appraises as being superior to Mozart), but these days that\u2019s more humanity than a lot of people could ever hope to muster.<\/p>\n Of course, the only musicians that really matter to \u201cAres\u201d are Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and while the score they created for this film isn\u2019t quite as memorable as the one that Daft Punk set to \u201cLegacy,\u201d its sleek but sinister electro grime plays an equally pivotal role in giving this sequel its own sense of violent self-identity. The songs are cranked up loud enough to give every scene its own haptic response (watching \u201cAres\u201d in body-vibrating Dolby is the closest you can get to 4DX without getting water splashed in your face), and the music is forceful in a way that allows even the most plug-and-play action beats to thrum with purpose. In a way that convinces your body \u2014 if not your mind \u2014 that the \u201cTron\u201d franchise actually wants to be alive, and not just simply refuse to die. It\u2019s the most convincingly human thing about a semi-decent sequel that was only programmed to serve its property\u2019s continued survival, even as it preaches that impermanence is more of a feature than a bug.<\/p>\n Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures will release \u201cTron: Ares\u201d in theaters on Friday, October 10.<\/p>\n Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n Best of IndieWire<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Indiewire’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source uk.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Joachim R\u00f8nning\u2019s \u201cTron: Ares\u201d is a movie about two warring tech billionaires who have very different intentions for the same revolutionary tech. Both of them are capable of rapidly 3D-printing anything they\u2019re able to design in the digital world, and both of them are in pursuit of the \u201cpermanence code\u201d that will allow their creations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2075160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[337180,389520,389519,389521,362355,360190,372788,372787,325724,362294,359443],"class_list":["post-2075159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-ares","tag-digital-world","tag-dillinger-systems-ceo-julian-dillinger","tag-encom","tag-evan-peters","tag-greta-lee","tag-jared-leto","tag-joachim-ronning","tag-joseph-kosinski","tag-tron","tag-tron-legacy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/An-AI-Jared-Leto-Discovers-His-Humanity-in-a-Sleek.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2075159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2075161,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075159\/revisions\/2075161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2075160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2075159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2075159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2075159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: C+<\/h2>\n