TRON: Ares
Genre: Sci-fi/Action
Release Date: October 10, 2025
Platform: Theaters
Star Rating: 1 ½
By Karl Simpson Jr.
“This is a film full of big ideas that never actually come together.”
Tron: Ares left me feeling… nothing. Not frustrated, not thrilled, just indifferent. For a film in a franchise built on visual imagination and conceptual ambition, that’s the worst reaction you can have. It’s not a trainwreck, but it’s not doing anything particularly worth remembering either. The visuals are sleek, the music hits, and the action sequences look great in motion, but all that style can’t hide what’s missing underneath. There’s no pulse, spark, or emotional drive pulling you in. It’s a technically polished experience that somehow forgets to feel alive.
The world of Tron has always been defined by its aesthetic, and on that front, Ares delivers. The neon glow, the digital landscapes, the fluidity of movement; all of it looks crisp and immersive. The score, too, carries that signature electronic pulse that gives the film an immediate energy boost. But once you get past the surface, nothing else holds it together. The story feels hollow, like it’s moving from one idea to the next without ever grounding them in something meaningful. You can tell the filmmakers were aiming for something grand, a story about creation, control, and what it means to be human, but it never really commits to any of it.
The setup has real potential: two CEOs representing opposite philosophies, one hungry for power through militarized AI and the other driven by connection and empathy. It could’ve been a fascinating moral and emotional clash about how far people are willing to go in shaping the future. But instead of digging into that tension, Tron: Ares buries it under exposition and flashy effects. The ethical questions that should anchor the story are treated like background noise, and what could have been a thoughtful exploration of technology’s double-edged nature becomes just another excuse for digital spectacle.
The biggest problem is that Ares doesn’t give you a reason to care about anyone in it. The characters aren’t people; they’re placeholders for ideas. Ares himself should’ve been the film’s emotional center, a synthetic being wrestling with what it means to live, feel, and choose compassion over programming. But his arc feels rushed, like the movie is checking off boxes rather than letting the transformation unfold naturally. His shift from weapon to savior doesn’t feel earned, and the human characters fare even worse. Their motivations are explained, not felt. You’re told what drives them, but never shown why it matters. Without that emotional grounding, even the most significant moments fall flat.
This is a film full of big ideas that never actually come together. You can sense the ambition, the attempt to balance spectacle with philosophical depth, but it pulls back every time it starts to go somewhere interesting. The result is a movie that’s constantly hinting at greatness but never willing to get its hands dirty. Everything feels safe, sanitized, and emotionally distant. It’s all concept and no connection. And for a film about bridging the gap between human and machine, that lack of humanity stings even more.
Say what you will about Tron: Legacy, but it at least gave you something to feel. Beneath the gloss and the Daft Punk beats, there was a father-son story that carried real emotional weight. You could connect to it. Ares doesn’t have that. It’s visually impressive, sure, but there’s no sense of purpose behind it. It looks meaningful without ever earning that meaning. You keep waiting for it to say something about technology, identity, and creation, but the message never arrives.
All in all, Tron: Ares is a visually sleek but emotionally empty experience. It has the look, the sound, and the ambition of a film that should hit hard, but none of the substance to make it stick. There’s no denying the craft behind it, but craft alone doesn’t make a film compelling. What’s missing is a heartbeat. It’s not offensively bad, it just drifts by, leaving little behind. For a franchise built on the fusion of man and machine, Tron: Ares ends up feeling precisely what it warns against: a product of design without a soul.
