Rating: ***
Review Date: 10/20/25
Director: Joachim Rønning
Music: Nine Inch Nails
Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith,
Jeff Bridges, Gillian Anderson
After Sam Flynn left Encom, it splintered into two competing companies: Encom continued to operate led by the Kim sisters, while Dillinger Industries was led by the psychotic and overly ambitious grandson of Ed Dillinger, Julian (Evan Peters). Both companies are experimenting with laser technology to fabricate matter, but the results don't last. Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) supposedly found the secret of "permanence" for transferring objects out of The Grid into the real world, and it's a race to see who can crack that secret first. Naturally, Julian wants to use his AI tech for military applications, while Eve Kim (Greta Lee) wants Encom to use AI to improve human life. Stuck in the middle of this is Julian's Master Control Program, Ares (Jared Leto), who is the ultimate, but expendable, soldier. When he learns a little too much, he rejects his programming and decides to help Eve instead of kill her, which makes Julian very angry. Unfortunately, Ares's underlings don't question their loyalty or their directives, and pretty soon they're making a mess in the real world and Julian can't stop them.
While the original plot for "Tron 3" was mercifully scrapped (Sam and Quorra living in the real world), this film still focuses on programs living in the real world, which is simply uninteresting. It's basically just your standard "evil tech bro loses control of his own super weapon" story with some "Tron" branding clumsily grafted onto it. But to be honest, technology has advanced so much in the last 40 years that it's nearly impossible to write an interesting Tron or cyberspace story these days. Simulation is so sophisticated that there's literally no reason why cyberspace wouldn't just resemble the real world. And while the scenes of The Grid are colorful and somewhat attractive, they're not interesting or visually appealing. The action scenes are similarly uninteresting and lack any real thrills. I can't quite explain how seeing lightcycles zipping through a crowded metropolitan cityscape could feel so lifeless, but it left me dead inside. Additionally, the soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails doesn't help, as it's too noisy and industrial sounding to create tension and emotional ambience.
Fortunately, the film features a strong and likable protagonist in Eve Kim, and Greta Lee gives a delightful performance. Unfortunately, she's literally the ONLY likable character in the film, and all of the male characters are intensely dislikable. However, she may be a little too good. Everything about Eve is wonderful and good, while everything about Julian is bad. It's very black and white and the characters have no subtlety or moral conflict, which makes them overly two-dimensional. Jared Leto gives a refreshingly restrained performance, although he also has plenty of cringey moments. Evan Peters is appropriately crazy, ruthless, and sinister, while Gillian Anderson struggles to keep the empire she built from falling apart under his foolish and reckless rule.
Overall, I was unimpressed with the film until the very end, which makes some absolutely brilliant callbacks to the original movie. I shrieked, I cried, and I shook in my seat because I couldn't contain my excitement. That alone was worth the price of admission and made my heart soar. I really wish they would just make an entire retro "Tron" movie at this point and set it in the 80s as a period piece instead of trying to shoehorn its retro ideas into modern times. And keep everything in cyberspace where it belongs. That said, regardless of whether you like him or not, I have to give credit to Jared Leto. Without him, this movie wouldn't exist, and it's clear that he is a true die-hard "Tron" fan. The attention to detail is superb and Flynn's server is a heartfelt love letter to the original. There's also a nice call-out to Sark and the original MCP, hiding out in Dillinger's servers.
So it's a mixed bag and your mileage may vary depending on how susceptible you are to nostalgia. While I found Greta Lee to be engaging and likable, I found the rest of the film to be tedious, pandering, and cliché, up until the big reveal, which featured five minutes of "oh my god this is so fucking incredible why isn't the entire movie like this?!?" That made me forgive some of its missteps, and I left the theater with a skip in my step and a smile on my face.