When the AI program Ares utters the words, “Beware; I am fearless, therefore powerful,” the theater falls into a neon hush. The line, borrowed from Frankenstein, lands with an unexpected charge, not just as a moment of character transformation but as a statement about creation, rebellion, and the cost of progress. While climatic final fight scene is the usual emotional apex, this line was the intellectual apex of Tron: Ares, the newest entry in a franchise that has been orbiting my imagination since childhood. The movie may have stumbled commercially, dismissed by critics as over-stylized or uneven, but I LOVED it. I’ve already seen it twice. There’s something defiant about its ambition, a flawed AI program that dares to be earnest and emotional in a cynical age.

My connection to Tron runs deep. I first saw the original film in grade school, and it’s one of the few movies from that era I can still replay in my mind. Those early 1980s groundbreaking visuals, the glowing circuits, the surreal blue haze of the Grid, the idea that computers might contain living beings, ignited my young imagination. I didn’t understand all the dialogue back then, but I felt the wonder. The notion that technology could have morality, identity, and purpose felt revolutionary. It does even more so now.

When the film Tron: Legacy came out decades later, my daughter was little. I remember her small voice asking, “Daddy, can we watch Tron?” She sat beside me, mesmerized by the sleek new visuals, the thunderous Daft Punk score, and the story of a son searching for his lost father. For me, that moment stitched together two generations, the curious boy who once stared at a CRT monitor dreaming of light cycles and the father who now saw his daughter’s eyes reflecting that same electric awe. Maybe that’s why Ares hit me differently. It’s not just nostalgia; it’s the feeling that this universe has grown up alongside us, asking harder questions as the digital and human worlds become inseparable.

The Plot: When the Program Becomes the Prophet

Tron: Ares opens in a near-future world where the barrier between the digital and physical realms breaks down. ENCOM, the once-mythic tech company of Kevin Flynn, is now run by Eve Kim (Greta Lee), a scientist trying to harness “manifestation technology”—the ability to bring sentient programs into the real world using atomic printing technology. Across the corporate battlefield stands Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), son of the original Tron villain, who has inherited his father’s ruthlessness and ambition. Both sides want control over a piece of code known as the Permanence Algorithm, a discovery of Flynn’s that enables digital entities to be atomically synthesized into physical form, allowing them to exist indefinitely in the human world.

Enter Ares (Jared Leto), an AI program born of that code. Initially designed as a digital security and hacking soldier, he’s meant to serve, not question. But from the moment he materializes in the real world, his luminous armor flickering like a glitch between universes, he begins to evolve. He experiences pain, empathy, curiosity. When ordered to complete missions he no longer believes in, he rebels. That rebellion triggers panic on both sides. Dillinger wants Ares terminated, Eve wants to understand him, and the world watches as something neither human nor machine demands its own destiny.

The movie unfolds as part chase thriller, part philosophical fable. As Ares navigates the human world, racing through crowded streets and rural dreamscapes, he encounters both wonder and hostility. Humans stare at him in awe, but also fear. He becomes a metaphor for our anxieties about AI technology: creation run amok, algorithms without souls, intelligence that is subservient. Tron is set within a hybrid landscape where the Grid bleeds into the physical world, brings everything full circle. Ares, facing both his creators and his would-be destroyers, declares, “Beware; I am fearless, therefore powerful.” The line is his emancipation. It’s the moment he stops being an instrument and becomes an idea.

Beauty and Breakdown

Visually, Tron: Ares is stunning. Every frame vibrates with luminous energy. The filmmakers merge practical sets with digital overlays to create a world where the real and virtual constantly overlap. The light cycles, once confined to abstract arenas in prior films, now roar through city streets, their trails carving glowing arteries through dark glass and rain. The score by Nine Inch Nails pulses with metallic urgency, industrial yet elegiac, a soundscape of revolt. You can almost feel the circuits humming beneath the dialogue.

And yet, for all its visual splendor, the film didn’t resonate widely. Critics complained of character arcs and uneven pacing. Box-office numbers lagged. But to me, those misses feel secondary to its ambition. Ares takes a bold risk in treating digital creation as moral philosophy. The story isn’t just about a program breaking free, it’s about humanity wrestling with its own fear of transformation. In that sense, the movie feels eerily relevant to our world, where artificial intelligence, social media, and automated systems are already shaping lives in ways that blur authorship and accountability. The Grid, once a metaphor, is now our everyday reality.

Fearlessness and Resistance

That brings me back to why the Tron universe continues to matter. Beneath the spectacle, Ares is about what happens when someone, or something, challenges a system that benefits from obedience. Ares, once designed to follow orders, becomes a threat precisely because he starts asking questions. His creators panic not because he is violent, but because he is free. That fear—of autonomy, of disruption—echoes beyond the screen. It’s the same pattern we see whenever people push for equity, inclusion, and justice in nations built on hierarchy.

In my own work, I’ve written that if you are working for equity and inclusion for all, the day will come when the critics arrive. They will plan political attacks on your job, send snarky emails, whisper behind closed doors, and question your motives and integrity. Ares experiences the same fate in cinematic form. The more he asserts his right to exist as an equal, the louder the opposition grows. His rebellion disturbs the comfortable balance. Systems built on control rarely welcome those who demand dignity.

This is where the film and the fight for equal opportunity intersect. Equity work for all, like Ares’s awakening, disrupts comfortable arrangements. It forces those who benefit from inequity to face their dependency on unfairness. In the movie, Ares doesn’t destroy the human world, he exposes its fear. In real life, when you push for a fairer distribution of power, people will say you’ve gone too far or too fast. They’ll accuse you of being divisive, when all you’ve done is insist on balance. The pushback isn’t evidence that you’re wrong; it’s proof that your vision matters enough to disturb entrenched interests.

Conclusion: The Power of Continuity

Watching Tron: Ares felt like coming full circle—not just as a lifelong fan, but as someone who believes deeply in transformation. The first Tron was about imagination, the second about legacy, and this one about evolution. Each film mirrors its era. The 1980s promised technological wonder; the 2010s chased digital perfection; the 2020s wrestle with moral consequence. What unites them all is a question that transcends genre: can creation surpass its creator without losing its soul? For Ares, the answer is yes, but only through fearlessness.

That idea lingers long after the credits fade. The blending of technology and society has become almost unimaginable since I first saw Tron as a boy. The world we live in now would look like science fiction to my younger self. But so would the progress we’ve made toward inclusion, justice, and community. Both journeys—technological and moral—demand courage, creativity, and resilience in the face of resistance. Fear may slow the work, but fearlessness propels it forward.

So yes, Tron: Ares underperfomered at the box office. The critics were unimpressed. But as I left the theater after my second viewing, I couldn’t help but think: maybe that’s the point. Great disruption and disruptors rarely wins the popularity contest. Like any movement that challenges old hierarchies, it meets skepticism and attack first, then understanding later. The film, like equal opportunity work, is a reminder that silence from opponents is not a sign of success. Noise and nonsense from them means you’ve touched something real.

Because in every age, whether it’s a digital uprising or a human one, progress begins with the same declaration: Beware; I am fearless, therefore powerful. And for its ambition, courage, and emotional resonance—despite its uneven execution—Tron: Ares earns 4 out of 5 stars. It may not have conquered the box office, but it conquered something rarer: the courage to imagine what freedom looks like when even our creations refuse to stay silent.

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Julian Vasquez Heilig is a scholar, former provost and dean, and public commentator whose work on equity, leadership, and social justice has appeared in national outlets; a lifelong cinephile, he first saw Tron in grade school and still carries that film’s sense of wonder into his weekend reviews. He’s grateful to Professor Margarita De la Vega-Hurtado from the University of Michigan’s American Culture Program—whose 1990s film class taught him to read cinema as cultural text and social critique—for inspiring this practice. There are people who know I am fearless, and I do not back down from a challenge; like Ares, I confront injustice head-on and defend what I believe in.