At The Movies: Jared Leto’s AI warrior crashes into Greta Lee’s real world in Tron: Ares

Tron: Ares (PG)

119 minutes, opens on Oct 9
★★☆☆☆

The story: Two mega-corporations dominate the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and both have mastered technology that turns digital avatars into real objects. Ares (Jared Leto) is an AI warrior program created by one corporation that controls the digital realm of The Grid. Ares is given the task of hunting Eve (Greta Lee), the head of a rival company, who holds a vital piece of AI code created by Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges). He is the genius who was digitised into the computer realm in original movie Tron (1982). Chaos erupts in the city as avatars are pitted against flesh-and-blood humans.

When it comes to sentient machines hunting humans, the bar for that science-fiction concept was set astronomically high with the first two Terminator movies (1984 and 1991).

Tron: Ares, the third movie in the franchise after Tron (1982) and Tron: Legacy (2010), has not only co-opted the Terminator concept, but has also chosen to do it in the most difficult way possible: by folding it into a PG-rated product.

The previous Tron films were PG as well. The difference is that they were set mostly in a digital universe, where violence is made clean and aesthetic.

This time, when the mayhem has moved to the real streets of an unnamed city, the bloodless combat between conscience-free digital avatars and human police officers looks and feels underwhelming. This reviewer was screaming for the ruthless hunter-killers to use their high-tech blades and blasters instead of just posing with them.

Despite the deliberate handicapping of the AI killers – what video-gamers call “nerfing” – there are good action scenes. The glowing orange light-walls created by the light-bikes that appear in the real world? A police car runs afoul of a wall with interesting results.

The conflict at the story’s centre begins when a Program – the name for software given human form – goes rogue. This happens with unseemly speed and is explained cursorily with dialogue about “wanting to be a real boy, like Pinocchio”, because the Program saw humanness and fell in love with it.

Note that the Terminator franchise took two movies to go the rogue route, and even then, it happened because the robot main character had its programming hijacked by humans.

To have infallible AI become fallible because its code “developed emotions” is a script convenience pulled from a B-movie. Imagine if the robot rebellion in HBO’s dystopian drama Westworld (2016 to 2022) happened because they “caught feelings”.

Norway-born director Joachim Ronning (Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil, 2019; Young Woman And The Sea, 2024) is an expert at delivering family-friendly action underpinned by an uplifting message.

But his flair for fantasy and drama-comedy fails to carry over to this science-fiction thriller, despite strong performances by Lee and comedic sidekick characters played by Hasan Minhaj and Arturo Castro.

Jodie Turner-Smith’s hunter-killer Athena conveys emotion, despite her playing an AI.

This Tron update highlights an interesting problem. In 1982, it was possible to believe that humans could walk into a computer like children walking into Narnia or Neverland. Visuals were fuzzy and forgiving.

In 2025, with Ronning’s tight close-ups showing Leto’s 53-year-old face in sharp detail, one is forced to ask: Why would a digital being in The Grid sport the beard and scraggly hair of a wannabe cult leader? That is such a waste of processing power.

Hot take: Tron: Ares neuters its own action by bringing killer AI into the real world, while keeping the bloodless and toothless PG rating.