Tron: Ares review: "Misses out by swapping the Grid for the real world"

Tron: Ares brings Kevin Flynn's digital frontier even closer to "reshaping the human condition" – by moving into the real world and bringing programs and users face-to-face. But the new movie, helmed by Disney stalwart Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil), is all the weaker for it.

You can see why Disney opted for this narrative choice, of course: 15 years since 2010's Tron: Legacy and 43 years after the original Tron movie was released in 1982, AI is a more pressing issue now than ever, and the line between the digital and the "real" is more and more blurred. So, the big question a new Tron movie has to ask is, what role does ENCOM (and the Grid) play in the 2020s?

Well, there's no sign of Kevin's son, Sam (played by Garrett Hedlund in Tron: Legacy), and the company is now being run by new blood: Eve Kim (Greta Lee) is now CEO. As the movie begins, Eve, unfulfilled by her work in video games, is on a top-secret mission to Flynn's secret backup ENCOM server in the Arctic. A relic of the '80s, she's spent three months painstakingly checking boxes and boxes of floppy disks (remember those?) in an attempt to find Flynn's Permanence Code, which has the power to bring anything – or anyone – out of the Grid and into the real world, permanently.

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Back in Center City, rival company Dillinger Systems and its rash, egotistical CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the grandson of the original movie's antagonist Edward, is also after the same code. While Eve has more noble intentions, Julian wants to use it to give his all-powerful military AI a concrete existence IRL, so he can sell his "100% expendable" supersoldier to the highest bidder – and, like any Disney villain, he'll stop at nothing to get it.

Just can get enough...

The supersoldier in question is Ares (Jared Leto), named imaginatively for the Ancient Greek god of war, Dillinger Systems' Master Control Program. Julian sends him and second-in-command Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) on a mission to capture Eve and extract the code, but what Julian doesn't take into account is Ares developing a mind of his own – and an unlikely connection with Eve.

The fact that most of the movie takes place in the real world as opposed to the neon-lit Grid is what differentiates Ares from what came before, but it also hugely narrows the scope of how visually interesting it can be compared to its predecessors. The aesthetics of the Grid, with its sleek angles and retro ideas of the future, have always been the franchise's strong point, and Ares misses out on that distinctiveness by going offline. Much of the movie's climactic battle, taking place in and above the streets of Center City, could be from any sci-fi blockbuster from the last 20 years, for example. And even when we do get lasered into the Grid, it feels like it's lost a little of its former sheen. Perhaps, for a modern viewer, a large part of its charm lies in its datedness.

Speaking of charm, Lee remains an extremely watchable screen presence, bringing the same likability to Eve that she did to her roles in Celine Song's romantic drama Past Lives or Netflix's time-loop comedy Russian Doll. She's a much more charismatic lead than Garrett Hedlund's Sam, but Leto feels like an odd choice to play Ares. He can't sell the quirky, Depeche Mode-loving AI persona, and the character falls flat compared to Olivia Wilde's naive but courageous Quorra in Legacy. This movie sees a "program" get as much screen time as a "user" for the first time in a Tron film, but I found myself wanting to spend more time with Eve than Ares (even after a ham-fisted Frankenstein reference attempts to give us more reason to empathize with him) – a pretty big problem for a film's titular character.

Super-sonic

Whether Tron movies are "good" sometimes feels beyond the point. The plot of Ares is much more digestible than its predecessors, but I missed the audacity of the original. In the same vein, there's an absence of a certain campness and humor that comes through in Michael Sheen's flamboyant Legacy character Castor, for example (although thank god Ares abandons that film's painfully 2010s quip-heavy dialogue). There aren't any Castors in Ares, unfortunately, and most of the supporting cast is pretty underbaked: Gillian Anderson is somewhat wasted as Julian's mother Elisabeth, doing little else than cast exasperated glances at her irritating son, and Eve's colleagues Ajay (Hasan Minhaj) and Seth (Arturo Castro) aren't given much to work with.

One area in which the threequel matches (or maybe even surpasses) the other movies in the franchise, though, is sonically. Like Daft Punk's Legacy score, Ares is elevated by another excellent soundtrack from Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who were also responsible for last year's banger Challengers score. One of the main reasons to see Ares on the big screen rather than wait for the Disney Plus release, I would argue, is for the opportunity to hear their industrial, pulsing backdrop to the movie's action scenes through proper theatrical speakers.

Otherwise, Ares doesn't reinvent the Lightcycle wheel. It's a perfectly serviceable blockbuster, and it mostly steers clear of nostalgia bait, aside from a shoe-horned sequence involving the return of Jeff Bridges' Flynn, but it lacks a certain something that made the other films in the franchise feel like they were breaking new ground. By changing the (video) game and bringing the programs to the users rather than vice versa, Ares strives to start a new chapter for Tron in the 2020s – but it risks pulling the plug on what made the series fun to begin with.

Tron: Ares arrives in theaters on October 10. For more, check out our guide to the rest of this year's biggest movie release dates.