For a movie, Tron: Ares makes a pretty damn good Nine Inch Nails album. If there was an Oscar for Best Lead Performance by a Score, then the legendary act—who notably composed the music for this film under the band name and not, as usual, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross—should positively win. The music is absolutely the best thing about the third Tron movie, carrying the load for large stretches of director Joachim Rønning’s film with its propulsive, throbbing rhythms and grandiose, distortion-encrusted swaths of sound.It’s a just shame that the rest of the film doesn’t live up to the power of the score. It’s not that Tron: Ares is bad, exactly; it’s just that the film, which does feature some notable performances and the kind of often dazzling visual effects that have become a hallmark of this 43-year-old (!) franchise, is also antiseptic and passionless. It’s a movie about AI that in many ways could have been made by the stuff.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});But here’s the dirty little secret of the Tron franchise: none of the films are really good. The first one, released in 1982, was groundbreaking in its use of early CG to create a truly unique and unforgettable conception of what the inside of a computer gaming matrix must look like, but the movie itself was rather dull and plodding. 2010’s Tron: Legacy, coming a full 28 years later, was the directorial debut of Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), who updated the Grid into an astonishingly beautiful digital landscape of sculptured light (even if a de-aged version of series mainstay Jeff Bridges fell short), and enlisted Daft Punk for that film’s game-changing score. But that movie also crawled along with a story that was nearly incomprehensible.We daresay that Tron: Ares is perhaps slightly better in that regard than its predecessor, only because the screenplay by Jesse Wigutow is about as straightforward as it can get. Aside from the references to the still-missing Flynn (Bridges), there’s no continuation of the Garrett Hedlund/Olivia Wilde narrative from Tron: Legacy. Instead gaming company ENCOM is now run by Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who took over the outfit with her late sister Tess. Their rival is the Dillinger company, founded by the late Ed Dillinger (David Warner in the original film) and now run by his grandson, Julian (Evan Peters), whose evil intentions are telegraphed early on.Both Eve and Julian want to find the “permanence code,” a program which will allow objects and entities created in the Grid to port over to our world—and for longer than the 29 minutes they currently get before collapsing into a pile of crystalline ash. Eve discovers the code in a file stashed away in Flynn’s old archives; Julian will stop at nothing to get it and calls up from the Grid two of the digital soldiers he’s trying to sell to the military: Ares (Jared Leto, a long way from his 2013 Oscar win for Dallas Buyers Club) and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), who have those 29 minutes to find Eve and transport her to the Grid, which for reasons that aren’t entirely clear is the only place that Julian can access the permanence code.But Ares himself is quite an intelligent and even sensitive fellow—err, program. His taste in music runs from Depeche Mode to Mozart even before stepping out of the Grid. After he gets a glimpse of our world and realizes that he may want to exercise some free will of his own, he strikes a deal with Eve to help her and possibly change the fate of AI technobabble forever.An artificial intelligence gaining sentience and deciding it wants to live. Where have we seen that before? Only in countless other sci-fi movies and TV shows, of course. It’s a well-worn trope that can still generate some interesting ideas, but in this case neither the conception of the Ares character nor the performance by Leto can breathe new life into the conceit. While the trailers for Tron: Ares promise a sort of “first contact” story between our world and the realm of the Grid, there’s no sense of awe or mystery in this film’s perfunctory close encounters.Ares is only in the real world for 20 minutes or so before he’s making jokes and psychoanalyzing Eve, who seems to take a slight fancy to this black-clad, bearded non-character. Leto delivers all his lines (except the jokes) in a combination of whisper and growl, and while he does have a few passing moments of humor or humanity, he has no discernible arc to play and doesn’t seem to care. He gives the impression that he’s more concerned with posing in his light-up suit.The ladies fare better. Greta Lee is probably miscast and doesn’t have quite the right energy to carry a film of this scale, but she brings warmth and empathy to a largely underwritten role. Jodie Turner-Smith, meanwhile, has quite a few effective moments as the relentless Athena, and Gillian Anderson makes the most of her limited screen time as Julian’s more morally conscientious mother. As for Julian, Peters plays him as a pretty one-note, entitled little tech bro while Arturo Castro shines as Eve’s right hand man Seth, who provides welcome comic relief.Rønning, a Disney house director who has Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil on his resume, continues the series’ visual razzle-dazzle with a fiercely glowing red as the primary color for the bad guys (hmm, a subtle hint maybe?) against the cool blue of ENCOM. But while he maintains the standards of the previous films, he doesn’t set any fresh ones: there’s nothing particularly new introduced in Tron: Ares that we haven’t seen before. The film’s best sequence is not the endless light cycle chase through real-world city streets, but a scene in which Ares must enter Flynn’s original, old-school version of the Grid, which the film dutifully recreates (“I like the ‘80s,” Leto intones), and which inevitably leads to plenty of more fan service.You can almost appreciate the simplicity and quiet of Steven Lisberger’s original Grid design as opposed to the rest of the loud, empty 2025 film now encrusted around it. It shamelessly tickles the nostalga. But then, nostalgia is the reason why the Tron franchise exists in the first place. The original movie was a moderate box office performer that got mixed reviews and became a minor cult classic. Tron: Legacy’s struggle to break even nearly 30 years later pointed out the limits of cult fandom and cultural memory. It’s kind of amazing that Tron: Ares even got made, but there’s a sense while watching it that no one involved knew exactly why they were making it. It plays as a perfunctory cash grab, two hours of going-through-the-motions filmmaking. But hey, there’s always that score to listen to.Tron: Ares opens in theaters on Friday, Oct. 10.The post Tron: Ares Review – When the Soundtrack Is the Star appeared first on Den of Geek.