Here’s a novel scenario: the year’s best score was written for the year’s 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 starts vibrating the butt cheeks. From despair to euphoria, despair to euphoria, on and on.
The band’s permanent members, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, have been regularly co-scoring films since The Social Network – mostly for David Fincher, occasionally for Luca Guadagnino (as in last year’s Challengers). Tron: Ares is the first time they’ve provided a score as Nine Inch Nails, inheriting duties from the now-disbanded Daft Punk, whose Gallic beeps littered the previous Tron film, 2010’s Legacy.
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’s agonised vocals creep into a key action sequence, but the whole affair carries the band’s 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.
You’re 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’s premise – Jeff Bridges gets sucked into a computer – feel like it was written by philosophers.
At a time when Disney’s 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. “All of the allegations are expressly denied,” a representative for Leto said in a statement made at the time.
Leto plays Ares, the AI “defender of the grid”, who alongside Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) does the digital dirty work of tech CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of Tron’s 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 – kudos to Turner-Smith, at least, for nailing the robot stride and the cool-tipped, efficient menace.
It’s especially painful when Jesse Wigutow’s script tries to signal Ares’s 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.
Indeed, Ares is that classic Pinocchio tale of the android yearning to be a real boy. Yet the big question of what is “more human than human” 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’s taken over games company ENCOM following the disappearance of Bridges’ Kevin Flynn and the abdication of his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund, who headlined Legacy).
We’re meant to root for Eve, which lends the film an especially sinister edge since she’s first introduced preaching that “what emerges from the unknown isn’t so scary”, before immediately enthusing about AI’s potential to resurrect dead relatives. She and Dillinger are both after the “Permanence Code”, which would allow digital assets like Ares to be 3D printed and then exist, fully formed, machine or flesh, in the real world.
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’s no interest here in the imaginative possibilities of the digital realm (in fact, it made me yearn for Legacy’s nightclub sequence), beyond a brief return to Eighties aesthetics so Leto can quip “classic” and we can get a Jeff Bridges cameo.
Dillinger is the scarier of the two CEOs. He’s 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’t exactly go down easily. Sure, we’ve been given a new Nine Inch Nails album in 2025 – but at what cost?
Dir: Joachim Rønning. Starring: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson, Jeff Bridges. Cert 12A, 119 minutes
‘Tron: Ares’ is in cinemas from 10 October
