Tron:Ares (Joachim Rønning, 2025)⭐⭐⭐

As a third installment to a franchise that almost nobody is invested in - some 15 years after Tron:Legacy and 43(!) years after the original Tron - Tron:Ares is... not bad? It might even be good if you can overlook a few major flaws.

T:A picks up the story, such as it is, decades after original hacker Flynn got sucked into the 'Game Grid' and forced to play 8 bit gladiatorial video games against anthropomorphic programs and... um, whatever else actually happened in Tron. In those missing years, tech companies have figured out how to reverse the 'get sucked into the computer' tech so now they can blow stuff out of the computer, i.e. 3D print the denizens of the Grid so they incarnate in our world.

Unfortunately, these printed beings and their vehicles 'de-res' after 29 minutes and crumble into pixelated special effects. Not great if you are an evil Tech Bro who wants to 3D print an army of super-soldiers led by the eponymous Ares (Jared Leto).

Now one of the new owners of Flynn's company has been searching for his semi-mythical 'permanence code' which can overcome this limitation. She only wants it so she can do good by 3D printing food to solve hunger, etc., of course.

Little does she know the evil Dillinger Corp headed up by the aforementioned Tech Bro and his mum, Scully from the X Files, are after that code too. And so, once he learns it might be able to free him from an endless cycle of 29 minute incarnations, does Ares.

There are a lot of positives about this film. The FX work is incredible, as you would expect, with the artificial 'solid light' nature of the Grid beings allowing for some wonderful juxtapositions with the real world. The music, by Nine Inch Nails, is up there with Daft Punk's stellar work for part 2 and while the basic premise of the films is of course absolute nonsense and based on an understanding of 'cyberspace' from before that word had been coined, it does at least make sense narratively.

Less good - Jared Leto. He is not actively bad as Ares and manages to nail his sense of wonder fairly well but, well, he is Jared Leto. You spend a lot of the film wishing he was someone else and speculating if he got into character by plugging himself into the mains between takes and only responding to questions in binary.

There are some clunky moments. Ares announcing his love for Depeche Mode seemed a bit of a laboured attempt to foreshadow a trip to the '1980s' world of the original Grid and an attempt to show how Ares understands his one human friend by having read all of her SMS messages, ever, comes across creepier than intended.

The film also at no point attempts to provide a rationale for how the 'solid light' stuff works in the real world. It just... does and characters seem unsurprised that a glowing motorbike can slice a car in half by emitting a razor sharp beam of light from its exhaust.

This is a film pretty much nobody asked for but as a piece of fun sci-fi it hits most of the right notes, and uses its mid credits scene to set up a sequel we can no doubt expect some time around 2063.