Tron: Ares - Jared Leto's AI adventure is all style, little spark

Disney's 2025 revival of the Tron franchise dazzles with sleek design and sound, but struggles to innovate beyond its digital nostalgia

- Husain Rizvi

It's been 15 years since Tron: Legacy lit up cinema screens with neon trails and Daft Punk's electronic pulse — and over 40 since the original Tron invited audiences into a digital frontier that felt impossibly futuristic.

That first film might not have been a box office hit, but it became a cult icon for dreamers and tech geeks alike, a visual prophecy of our eventual AI obsession. Now, in 2025, Tron: Ares brings us back to the grid—only this time, it breaks out of it.

Director Joachim Rønning (Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) takes the reins of Disney's long-dormant cyber universe, with Jared Leto leading the charge as Ares — a program brought from the digital world into the real one by Dillinger Systems' head Julian Dillinger (grandson of Ed Dillinger from the original Tron). But there's a catch: The program has a life expectancy of just 29 minutes.

It's a bold inversion of the usual Tron premise, but one that quickly runs into familiar circuitry.