Tron Ares: Mark Kermode’s scifi film review (video).

Mark Kermode, our man of many movies, is here to bring you his take on the new Tron flick – see the video above.

And here’s the Nest’s thoughts on the film…

There’s a moment early on in Tron: Ares when a digital orange tree blossoms into the real world and manages to hang on for more than half an hour. Reader, I was rooting for that citrus more than half the cast of the last five superhero films. Joachim Rønning’s sequel is obsessed with that idea of “permanence”—how to make the ephemeral endure—an oddly touching preoccupation for a franchise that’s always been accused of being more screensaver than cinema.

Set fifteen years after Legacy, we’re back in that deliciously impossible borderland where venture capital meets vector graphics. ENCOM, still rummaging around in Kevin Flynn’s attic of miracles, is trying to coax Programs into reality without them evaporating like mayflies. Opposite them sits Dillinger Systems, now run by the grandson of the original corporate rotter, who has named his new Master Control Program “Ares” because nothing says “this will go well” like invoking the god of war. Jared Leto plays Ares with a careful, surprising restraint—less cult leader, more wide-eyed newborn with a gladiator’s skillset. He’s curious, sardonic at the edges, and just alien enough to sell the central tension: a thing born of logic that keeps making inconveniently human choices.

Greta Lee gives the film its pulse as ENCOM’s CEO Eve Kim: sharp, driven, and haunted by a private grief that nudges the plot away from mere heist-of-the-week. When the story remembers that Ares and Eve are mirror problems—the Program desperate to live, the human desperate to mean something—it hums. Their odd-couple road (light-cycle?) movie across ports, labs, and the creaking bones of Flynn’s legacy gives the script the best of its “can code feel?” questions without drowning us in techno-babble.

On the villain bench, Evan Peters’ Julian Dillinger is a venture-bro Frankenstein who keeps insisting his monster is “expendable.” He’s helped and hindered by Gillian Anderson’s Elisabeth Dillinger, who slides icily through boardrooms like a dagger in a silk sheath. Jodie Turner-Smith’s Athena, Ares’s second-in-command-turned-company-woman, provides the film’s most kinetic threat: a ruthless enforcer who gets just enough glimmers of self-awareness to complicate the punch-ups before turning back into a gorgeous red scythe of doom.

And yes, Jeff Bridges returns, less as plot glue and more as an idea—Flynn as patron saint of the frontier between people and programmes. His brief, mindful cameo on the old Grid is exactly the right dose: a benediction rather than a bailout. Mercifully, the film dodges the parade of cameos trap; there are nods, there are winks, but Ares mostly stands on its own two glowing boots.

If you come to Tron for the look and the noise, you’ll leave well-fed. Jeff Cronenweth’s cinematography finds a crisp, industrial beauty in the real world, then lets the neon sing inside the systems. It’s less slick chrome than Legacy and more brutalist light sculpture; the colour story leans scarlet—a war-code aesthetic that makes those iconic vehicles feel newly predatory. The set-pieces are readable, generous with geography, and use verticality with a glee that would make a parkour coach nervous: recognisers become falling cities; light-cycles carve luminous ribbons that double as snares. It’s all very “what if the MoMA gift shop decided to murder you?”—and I mean that as a compliment.

The score, courtesy of Nine Inch Nails under the Nine Inch Nails banner (Disney twisting the dial to “industrial” and breaking it off), is a throbby delight. Where Daft Punk’s Legacy soundtrack felt like a reverent cathedral of synth, NIN give us a foundry: pistons, hiss, and heartbeat. It’s propulsive without ever becoming wallpaper, and it gives Ares a sonic identity that’s less messiah, more machine learning to breathe. When the film cuts loose—recognisers roaring overhead, light-tanks disgorging fire—the music shoves you forward like a bouncer who’s secretly on your side.

Narratively, it’s not all victory laps around the game grid. The script’s obsession with permanence sometimes manifests as a reluctance to delete its own subroutines. There are one or two too many corporate double-crosses, a couple of “we’ve got the code/no we haven’t” handoffs, and an endgame that tries to juggle personal stakes, boardroom coups, and airspace chaos all at once. The result is occasionally programmatic: you can feel the film clicking through conditions in an if/then chain until the final boss obligingly loads.

But when it stops chasing plot and lets the characters ask better questions, Ares earns its keeps. The best scenes are small: Eve and Ares sharing quiet philosophy mid-flight; an injured Program being saved against orders; Athena pausing under a sprinkler system as if rain were a new religion. The franchise has always been tempted by its own glow; here, it looks outward at our familiar mess—tech monopolies, AI ethics, the seduction of “disruption”—and at least tries to mount a response more nuanced than “users bad, programs good.”

Leto’s performance is crucial to that trick. There’s a version of this film where Ares is an immaculate statue who learns to smile in the third act and we all clap politely. Thankfully, we get something stranger: a creature whose curiosity reads as courage. Greta Lee matches him beat for beat, never surrendering her character’s agency to the mystery boyfriend from beyond the monitor. Their chemistry isn’t romantic (thank the users); it’s philosophical. They sharpen each other. Elsewhere, Turner-Smith storms through like a deluxe content patch labelled “combat upgrades,” and Anderson lends boardroom scenes the dramatic heft of a Shakespeare aunt with controlling shares.

Is it better than Legacy? Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we love this kind of pub argument. Visually, Ares is less baroque and more brutal; musically, it trades gilded anthemics for serrated pulse; thematically, it’s on surer footing whenever it treats “AI in the world” as a human story rather than a headline tie-in. It won’t convert the cynics who found Tron a pretty screensaver with daddy issues. But for those of us who enjoy the franchise’s peculiar cocktail of earnest metaphysics and designer violence, this is the most Tron a Tron film has felt since 1982.

There’s even a touch of melancholy in the coda: Ares walking the world, sending postcards, looking for others like him. It’s the franchise quietly admitting what it’s been about all along—not gods in the machine, but orphans in a crowd, trying to last. Permanence, after all, is just memory with better PR.

So yes, it stumbles. Yes, the plot sometimes feels like a board meeting in a hall of mirrors. But when the lights drop, the recogniser shadows roll over the city and NIN’s engines kick in, Tron: Ares finds the sweet spot between sleek and savage. It might not be the definitive statement this series has been chasing, but it’s a worthy new skin for an old ghost—elegant, a bit angry, and very much alive for longer than thirty minutes. Which, for a digital orange tree or a legacy franchise, is a win.