Tron: Ares proves that not even the grid is immune from enshittification.

The first thing you notice about Tron: Ares is that it’s loud. Like, really loud. Like confidence is quiet, insecurity is loud, loud. When Tron: Legacy arrived twenty-eight years after the original it did so with breathtaking evolutionary leap forward, an aesthetic upgrade: improved graphics, higher frame rate and a pulsating score that made the most of your sound system. Tron: Ares, a further fifteen years on, delivers none of those things. Instead of a brand-new interface, we get feature stagnation and reduced functionality. In place of the visionary Joseph Kosinski, we get the workmanlike Joachim Rønning. In place of Daft Punk, we get Nine Inch Nails with the volume cranked all the way up to 12. Instead of an evolution of the visual language of Tron we get a change to the desktop theme colour. And instead of anyone – anyone else at all – we get Jared Leto.

Fifteen years after Sam Flynn attempted to retrieve his father Kevin from the Grid, ENCOM and Dillinger Systems, now led by Ed Dillinger’s grandson Julian (Evan Peters) are locked in a technological race to bring digital constructs into the real world. However, all constructs are limited by a 29-minute integrity threshold after which any digital creations decompile in the real world. While ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee) and her partner Seth Flores (Arturo Castro) search for the “permanence code” in Alaska in the belief that Kevin Flynn solved the problem decades ago, Julian Dillinger trusts to his new Master Control Programme Ares (Jared Leto) to hunt the information down, whether on the grid or in the real world. Tron: Ares is The Minecraft Movie for 3D Printing nerds.

With a director and soundtrack that just aren’t as good as Legacy’s, Ares has to rely on the cast and story to fill up its bandwidth but it’s there it starts to lag. Jared Leto plays Ares, a security programme designed by Dillinger who begins to question his programming after he’s brought into the real world for a stage-managed product demo and sees some rain. Or at least that seems to be the inciting incident because then he further questions his programming because Julian Dillinger is, well, a bit of a dick (a warning to those who treat their chatbots badly). It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on with Ares, though, because Leto seems to have been taking acting lessons from Gal Gadot to nail the flat emotionless tone of a digital automaton but once he’s electronically emancipated himself, his performance doesn’t vary. Elsewhere, the only other performances which offer some mitigation against the charisma sinkhole of the movie’s lead are also in the villain camp, with Gillian Anderson and Evan Peters serving up enough darkly oedipal energy to make you wonder if this third film might have been better to focus on the darker side of tech giants rather than continuing the fantasy that there’s such a thing as a good tech conglomerate. In the Encom corner are a bland assortment of makeweights who make so little impression you’ll likely forget them as soon as the lights come back up in the theatre. Greta Lee is fine in a thankless role of a CEO who is somehow invariably a damsel in distress, but she shares zero chemistry with her supposed partner, played by Arturo Castro who’s only direction note seems to have been “always be the most annoying person in the scene”.

In many ways it’s the lack of continuity from Tron: Legacy that frustrates the most. Well, that and the corporate AI propaganda that’s subsumed any idea of storytelling. There’s a fleeting mention of Garrett Hedlund’s character during the opening infodump and a photo of Quorra right at the end that reassures that the ending of Legacy wasn’t ruined by Quorra abruptly decompiling less than half an hour after the credits had stopped rolling. But Tron: Ares doesn’t feel particularly connected to the first two and ends up stealing props, characters and settings from the 1982 film to convince you of its credentials.

Essentially the two firms, Encom and Dillinger, are locked in a race to create Star Trek’s replicator technology/ transporters but absolutely none of these code-coddled technocrats ever seem to realise that, they’re so focussed on bringing their militarised digital waifu into the real world but tedious corporate shenanigans have never made a good movie and in a battle between arsehole (Ares-hole?) techbros. I don’t care who wins because I already know who’ll lose.

If the cast and story can’t save the film either, maybe the action can? I mean, it looks glossy enough but bringing the neon-coded grid gang into the real world is almost as old as Tron itself. Just ask Automan. Even then, it can’t quite decide if they’re hyper efficient, infallible agentic operators or goofy fish-out-of-water relatables, like when Ares can drive a sports car at breakneck speed weaving in and out of Bay Area traffic but can’t park the car kerbside without hilariously hitting a trash can and some parked bikes/ And there’s just no forgiving the contortions the film goes through to make its central MacGuffin – the permanence code – difficult to get to, something the film undermines after the arduous trek to Alaska by casually dropping in the third act that it probably exists on a server back-up in the replica of Flynn’s office that’s preserved inside Encom headquarters.

Tron: Ares introduces too many characters we don’t care about and too many ideas that aren’t compatible with each other let alone backwards compatible with the previous films. Tron: Legacy, for all its flaws, felt like it was made for the love of the idea of Tron. Tron: Ares feels like it was commissioned, developed and written by an AI chatbot which badly hallucinated that Jared Leto would make a viable lead for a third attempt at turning this niche property into a bankable blockbuster franchise. It doesn’t even have any Tron in it. Ironically for a movie about permanence, you’ll want to forget it as soon as it’s finished.