Tron Ares – the Grid comes crashing into the real world (trailer).
It’s been 15 years since Tron: Legacy gave us Daft Punk in motorcycle helmets and CGI Jeff Bridges mumbling existential code poetry. Now, Disney is rebooting the neon-drenched cyberverse once more with Tron: Ares—a third instalment that promises to blast through your firewall, overload your sense of nostalgia, and possibly make you fear your toaster.
Directed by Joachim Rønning (who clearly asked for “more lasers, fewer pirates” this time around) and starring Jared Leto as Ares, a super-intelligent program sent from the digital world into the real one, Tron: Ares is not just a sequel—it’s the franchise’s long-awaited System Update. And if the newly released trailer is anything to go by, we’re in for a ride that’s part Ex Machina, part Blade Runner, and entirely powered by industrial synth rage.
Ares, the program with the cheekbones of Jared Leto and the computing power of a small continent, is humanity’s first taste of AI incarnate. Naturally, things go wrong. Possibly very, very wrong. This is Tron, after all—the series that once asked, “What if your spreadsheets could kill you?” Leto’s Ares is a sleek, silent enigma in the trailer, punching tanks and glitching like he’s just emerged from a heavy Reznor remix of Clippy.
Speaking of Reznor: Tron: Ares trades in Daft Punk’s glossy electro-cool for full-blown Nine Inch Nails menace. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are scoring under their NIN moniker for the first time, which tells you everything you need to know. This isn’t Tron: Rave Night at The Arcade. This is Tron: The Singularity Ate Your Children. The trailer’s moody remix of “Something I Can Never Have” oozes across every glowing panel, dripping dread and machine melancholy in equal measure.
Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Gillian Anderson (playing a member of the Dillinger dynasty, because of course she is) round out a cast that screams “prestige streaming series accidentally wandered onto a light cycle.” Add in Jeff Bridges returning as Kevin Flynn—yes, the Flynn, still monologuing in that Zen Silicon Valley cadence—and we’re back on the Grid, baby, whether we like it or not.
But this time, the war spills into our world. Gone are the days of being sucked into an arcade machine. Now, the simulation has breached the firewall, and your very lawnmower might be plotting to rewrite reality. It’s a bold move—one that finally answers the franchise’s most burning question: what if you brought a sentient code-warrior into rush hour traffic?
Here at SFcrowsnest, we salute Disney’s decision to give Tron another go, even if it took 15 years, three directors, a pandemic, and multiple strikes to get there. Will Tron: Ares actually work? Will it reboot the franchise? Or will it crash like an overclocked Amiga trying to stream Interstellar? We don’t know. But we’ll be first in line come October 10th 2025, IMAX goggles on, hoping this time someone presses “save.”
Because if Tron: Ares has taught us anything, it’s that reality is now read/write—and the users are no longer in control.
