Divalicious Review! ‘Tron: Ares’ Jared Leto May Be An AI Glitch
By Caroline Cao | October 9, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture
An advanced AI, taking a human form, longs for humanity. Heard this sci-fi premise before? And to be clear, that’s not a bad asset. One step up from the 2010 Tron Legacy installment—a visual wonder in itself—is that Tron: Ares has a better, more intimate grasp of human concerns (I say this as someone who is also a fan of the unjustifiably canceled Tron Uprising cartoon series). There’s more time to sit on the nature of humanity and what makes us human.
While movies about sentient AI may be troubling for this era, as if films about sentient AI are endorsing the ills that real AI is causing, they still can be taken as fables about hypotheticals.
But there is a glitch.
Its name is Jared Leto, as Ares, the advanced AI that exists in the virtual space — the “Grid.” And it’s not so much his wide-eyed blank-slate performance (which has a dramaturgical reason) but the optics around a white man being the center of this particular plot and arc, as well as his romance-ish vibe with Greta Lee’s human character, aged immediately.
I found that his center arc could very much be swapped out with Jodie Turner-Smith‘s chillingly cold Athena, Ares’s second-in-command, who’s devoted to her directive, although a tragic edge emerges later in the film. Alas, Leto is a producer on this film, and it is unlikely that it would venture beyond heteronormativity.
Lee impresses as a bright, optimistic programmer and ENCOM CEO, Eve Kim (ENCOM was the company owned by Jeff Bridges in the original 1983 film). You do root for her, and the film has us sit on her motives and backstory.
As a foil to Eva, Evan Peters’s CEO, Julian Dillinger, ENCOM’s rival CEO, is campy fun and pathetically deplorable as a man-child who lords over Ares and would commit murder to destroy his rival, ENCOM. There are great moments where Julian plays God behind the keyboards, relaying instructions to his creations. In the perspective of his virtual subjects, they see a blocky, commanding face not unlike the Wizard of Oz. But then the camera cuts back to a wincing human who seems bemused that he can’t play the role of a God as easily.
While Tron: Ares can’t seem to shed the sense of story mechanics (by screenwriter Jesse Wigutow), you can feel the film almost commanding itself into something fully good, with a capital G, and almost hit the sweet spots of humanity.
If you’re here for grand visuals, then Tron: Ares does have its sandbox of palettes, marrying the nostalgic retrograde of the original 1980s film and the bioluminescence of its current visual effects. One visual advantage is the ribbon stream that the motors leave behind, which can slice apart a hapless police cruiser; Tron: Ares tests how much these brushstrokes of light can glow in a nighttime city setting, so it has some credit there.
Tron: Ares is a bit of a hodgepodge, but it’s still a thoroughly entertaining installment in a franchise struggling for momentum. At times, it delivers a music video of rad imagery–thanks to Nine Inch Nails‘ composition and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross‘ respective producing credits. Would Ares hang long in the cinematic consciousness?
I believe, ultimately, Tron: Ares struggles with balancing the iciness and immersion of its Grid world with that of the real world. While Tron: Ares has its sentimental intentions, it does end up melting into them.
Tron: Ares opens nationwide on October 10.
