{"id":2076227,"date":"2025-10-08T02:35:42","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2076227"},"modified":"2025-10-08T02:35:42","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:35:42","slug":"ares-review-the-worst-film-of-the-year-and-a-new-low-for-disney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/ares-review-the-worst-film-of-the-year-and-a-new-low-for-disney\/","title":{"rendered":"Ares review \u2013 The worst film of the year and a new low for Disney"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Here\u2019s a novel scenario: the year\u2019s best score was written for the year\u2019s worst film. It creates, in turn, a kind of inescapable, torturous psychic loop: the brain starts to stall as each technobabble line of dialogue and drab narrative turn of Tron: Ares enters the processing centres, only for it to be periodically zapped back into consciousness when a new track by rock outfit Nine Inch Nails<\/a> starts vibrating the butt cheeks. From despair to euphoria, despair to euphoria, on and on.<\/p>\n

The band\u2019s permanent members, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, have been regularly co-scoring films since The Social Network \u2013 mostly for David Fincher, occasionally for Luca Guadagnino (as in last year\u2019s Challengers<\/a>). Tron: Ares is the first time they\u2019ve provided a score as Nine Inch Nails, inheriting duties from the now-disbanded Daft Punk, whose Gallic beeps littered the previous Tron film, 2010\u2019s Legacy.<\/p>\n

And this, in whatever way can be distinguished, feels like a Nine Inch Nails score versus a Reznor and Ross one. Not only do Reznor\u2019s agonised vocals creep into a key action sequence, but the whole affair carries the band\u2019s raw, erotic drive, the industrial grinding of its bass lines played against lighter, more intricate motifs circling around each other like lines of code or a genetic double helix.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re listening to all this, though, while actively looking at the most disposable franchise fodder imaginable. Tron: Ares has the visual flair of a mobile game and a thematic depth that makes the 1982 original\u2019s premise \u2013 Jeff Bridges gets sucked into a computer<\/a> \u2013 feel like it was written by philosophers.<\/p>\n

At a time when Disney\u2019s lost crucial critical ground at the box office, it has decided to revive a series with no real cultural footprint beyond a rollercoaster and install as its lead Jared Leto, a historically controversial actor who this summer was accused by nine women of sexual misconduct, several of them when they were minors. \u201cAll of the allegations are expressly denied,\u201d a representative for Leto said in a statement made at the time.<\/p>\n

\"Greta<\/span><\/div>\n

Greta Lee, Jared Leto and Arturo Castro in \u2018Tron: Ares\u2019 (Leah Gallo)<\/p>\n

Leto plays Ares, the AI \u201cdefender of the grid\u201d, who alongside Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) does the digital dirty work of tech CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of Tron\u2019s Ed (played in that film by David Warner). Leto sees his role as an artificial being as an excuse to be as flat as possible \u2013 kudos to Turner-Smith, at least, for nailing the robot stride and the cool-tipped, efficient menace.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s especially painful when Jesse Wigutow\u2019s script tries to signal Ares\u2019s blossoming humanity by having him crack little jokes and, at one point, riff on the Huey Lewis and the News monologue Christian Bale delivered to Leto in American Psycho, only here about Depeche Mode and without the subsequent murder.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Ares is that classic Pinocchio tale of the android yearning to be a real boy. Yet the big question of what is \u201cmore human than human\u201d has been stripped of its typical, Frankenstein-ish power struggles of father-son, creator-creation, as Ares ends up besties with rival CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee). She\u2019s taken over games company ENCOM following the disappearance of Bridges\u2019 Kevin Flynn and the abdication of his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund, who headlined Legacy).<\/p>\n

We\u2019re meant to root for Eve, which lends the film an especially sinister edge since she\u2019s first introduced preaching that \u201cwhat emerges from the unknown isn\u2019t so scary\u201d, before immediately enthusing about AI\u2019s potential to resurrect dead relatives. She and Dillinger are both after the \u201cPermanence Code\u201d, which would allow digital assets like Ares to be 3D printed and then exist, fully formed, machine or flesh, in the real world.<\/p>\n

\"Jared<\/span><\/div>\n

Jared Leto in \u2018Tron: Ares\u2019 (Leah Gallo)<\/p>\n

Practically, this means relatively little of Tron: Ares takes place in the Tron world. The climax of a lightcycle chase (meaning a Tron-ified motorcycle) sees two vehicles burst through several large stacks of recycled paper in downtown Vancouver. The future! There\u2019s no interest here in the imaginative possibilities of the digital realm (in fact, it made me yearn for Legacy\u2019s nightclub sequence), beyond a brief return to Eighties aesthetics so Leto can quip \u201cclassic\u201d and we can get a Jeff Bridges cameo.<\/p>\n

Dillinger is the scarier of the two CEOs. He\u2019s got military capability on his mind. But the idea that Eve should be our hero, in a film made by a studio with a long track record of digital necromancy, doesn\u2019t exactly go down easily. Sure, we\u2019ve been given a new Nine Inch Nails album in 2025 \u2013 but at what cost?<\/p>\n

Dir: Joachim R\u00f8nning. Starring: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson, Jeff Bridges. Cert 12A, 119 minutes<\/p>\n

\u2018Tron: Ares\u2019 is in cinemas from 10 October<\/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.style.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a novel scenario: the year\u2019s best score was written for the year\u2019s worst film. It creates, in turn, a kind of inescapable, torturous psychic loop: the brain starts to stall as each technobabble line of dialogue and drab narrative turn of Tron: Ares enters the processing centres, only for it to be periodically zapped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2076228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[337180,347976,334249,389827,372788,349037,389522,317973,347973,347974],"class_list":["post-2076227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-ares","tag-atticus-ross","tag-david-fincher","tag-david-warner","tag-jared-leto","tag-jeff-bridges","tag-julian-dillinger","tag-luca-guadagnino","tag-nine-inch-nails","tag-trent-reznor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Ares-review-\u2013-The-worst-film-of-the-year-and.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076227","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=2076227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2076229,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076227\/revisions\/2076229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2076228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2076227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2076227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2076227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}