One of Our Oldest Sci-Fi Franchises Is Back. The New Movie Is Woefully Out of Step With Our Moment. | Tron: Ares is like if a Terminator movie wanted you to cheer for Skynet.

https://slate.com/culture/2025/10/tron-ares-movie-2025-jared-leto-ai.html

26 comments

  1. Where was this outrage over Free Guy, a movie about a video game character that wanted free will? I’m sure there’s a dozen other examples.

    This article is just an “AI bad” opinion piece disguised as a movie review.

  2. Tbh after you’ve seen _The Second Renaissance_ (Animatrix) humans had it coming.

  4. It’a funny. All the bots. Supporting themselves. Dead internet.

  7. You couldn’t pay me to watch Jared Leto cringe all over a screen for a few hours

  9. Writing was awful. Leto is a hack, and Disney is lost

  12. Honestly, the last few Terminator movies DID make me root for SkyNet, if only to end the franchise for good.

  13. I’ve seen this criticism a few times but I’m not sure how it fits. “Skynet” in this case would be the evil corporation creating the war programs, and they’re never once presented as the good guys. Ares is essentially the Terminator in T2 who goes against the will of its creators to protect the person they’re trying to kill.

    The only way I can think of is it’s essentially good CEO vs evil CEO, but the good side isn’t making killer robots, nor are they in the defense industry at all. They’re an extension of the same game company that has been portrayed in all three films, so they’re not even unique to this.

    Maybe the line in her archival footage about AI being capable of being a force for good? But that’s also something that’s not unique to Ares and has been touched on in the other two films.

  14. Haven’t seen the movie or plan to anytime soon, but why is Tron Ares set in the real world? The whole point of Tron was psychadelic look of the digital world and exploring that. Did the creators think, oh wait the Tron universe isn’t working because people are tired of the neon colors and bold look of the world, let’s move it to real life and make it boring looking.

  15. Have only seen trailers and synopses, but it strikes me that it looks as if it was not originally written/intended to be a TRON film

  16. Have only seen trailers and synopses, but it strikes me that it looks as if it was not originally written/intended to be a TRON film

  18. You couldn’t pay me to go to the theater to watch this movie. Jared Leto sucks as an actor and Disney ruins everything.

  19. Seeing NIN at the premier was cool. Hadn’t seen them in person before so I can check that off my list now.

  20. Three more bombs and Jared Leto gets a free smoothie.

  21. Way to spoil the movie, screw this headline, and post on this reddit.

  22. >Tron: Ares is like if a Terminator movie wanted you to cheer for Skynet.

    Not a bad idea, but I got the impression that’s not why their are at fault with this movie. 😅

  23. As if it wasn’t already a hard sell to ask me to root for Jared Leto

  24. I liked it. I thought it was a fun time at the movies. I don’t think it’s going to be super memorable, but it was worth the price of admission. I do think this movie had the potential to be really interesting. Also, as much as I don’t like Jared Leto, he was fine. To me the movie felt rushed. Everything was alluded to or shown in a montage but you had to infer why everything turned out the way it did. I think they could have spent a lot more time exploring Leto’s motivation for why he did what he did. They hinted a little bit here and there, but I would have liked it if they would have gone a lot deeper. I wonder if maybe this had been something like a 6-part series on Disney+ instead so they could really explore not just Leto’s character, but also what happened at Encom and in particular explored the other sister and her story. But I don’t regret going to see it.

  26. I’m not even gonna pretend this was some cinematic masterpiece (visually and audio yes, script no) but this is a wild interpretation of the movie. The entire movie is about Ares potentially being a budding Skynet and then making the choice to NOT be that.

    >”The movie’s bad A.I. is the one that does what it’s programmed to do, and we’re meant to cheer for the one that sets its own agenda, as if it were some sad-eyed Frankenstein’s monster and not a budding Skynet.”

    Literally yes. The bad AI was wrecking the city and murdering people and was the actual equivalent to Skynet and you don’t want to cheer for her at any point. The “human” moments of the film were Ares waking up to the fact that what he was being asked to do was fucked up and going against his programming to the point he was willing to sacrifice himself for other people.

    It’s not nearly as good as Legacy, and i’m actually pretty disappointed it has basically zero continuity with that movie. Feels like a big miss because I think a far more interesting story would have been about Quorra already being in the real world and seeing the difference between Ares and Quorra. Like you already had a storyline from the last movie about a digital being going into the real world, why not pick that storyline up if you’re gonna make a whole movie centered around programs going into the real world. But it was enjoyable and as a 200m NIN music video, it’s worth a watch.

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