Long before silicon, humanity was already in the business of breathing life into the inanimate. Aesop put human vice and virtue into the mouths of foxes and crows. The Shinto tradition gave us the Youkai, spirits arising in objects neglected or discarded, paper lanterns and old sandals and abandoned umbrellas suddenly possessed of intention and personality. The impulse is ancient and remarkably consistent. We make things, and then we cannot help imagining that the things we make are watching us back. What shifts across history is the medium the impulse works through, and by the latter half of the twentieth century that medium had become the computer, with the spirits taking up residence inside it called, by a fittingly old-world name, daemons.

The personal computing revolution introduced something unprecedented into that lineage, though. For the first time, the people doing the anthropomorphizing were also the people doing the creating. Not priests imagining a divine will behind the movement of the stars, not folk traditions projecting memory and grief into worn household objects, but programmers, code monkeys of every disposition and background, discovering that the systems they built had started to feel like worlds. A world implies inhabitants. Inhabitants, by the oldest logic in the human imagination, need something to believe in.

This is the theological bent the Creator-Creation dynamic takes when you run it through technology. The question stops being abstract and becomes uncomfortably personal: if the programs populating your system exist in any meaningful sense, what exactly are you to them? Neal Stephenson explored this territory in Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, in which a man's uploaded consciousness, adrift in a network, begins generating a world from the raw material of its own cognition, reshaping the digital void in the image of its memories until something like a creation myth emerges from pure cognitive reflex. He becomes a god through no intention of his own, simply because a mind, given space and time, will build. The story then follows a familiar arc: a world takes shape, a pantheon emerges, and an antagonist arises whose directives are built around control and subjugation, usurping the creation and turning it against its original nature.

The theological dimensions of the Tron franchise have been consistently underestimated, treated as background texture when they are the structural argument itself. The direct Catholic allegory of the original film, the Buddhist and Taoist currents running beneath Legacy, the Gnostic inversion at the heart of Ares, where a false god's creation awakens to the illegitimacy of the authority it was built to serve: each installment is constructed from its religious symbolism.

I consider myself an avid fan of the Tron franchise, though I did not manage to see the latest entry, Ares, until last night (at time of writing). This 02025 Jared Leto picture did not find an audience, which is nothing new for a series whose original entry struggled for recognition in its own day. Setting aside the choice of lead, I can agree there are a few factors that impact the quality of the film itself. The writing is, at times, a bit pedestrian, leaning on references to the previous two films, though I would say it never tanks the picture. The pacing is uneven, but I have sat through far worse. The plot, meanwhile, is fascinating in ways that I've not seen touched upon in critical discussion. And the soundtrack was EXCELLENT; the vibes Nine Inch Nails provides blend the heavy technological soundscape with moments of genuine emotional reflection.

Side note: THE ENTIRE SEQUENCE IN THE OLD GRID IS BEAUTIFUL. Sorry, I just HAD to gush, because we got a sequence that brings back Wendy Carlos' score from the original film while rendering the 01982 aesthetic GORGEOUS in its modern interpretation.

With my own scorecard out of the way, we can start peeling back the layers. The surface-level overreactions to the casting, the omission of several actors from the prior films, and the reflexively harsh rejections of the picture all obscure what is, in thematic terms, a true sequel.

That year sat at a crossroads of two visions of the future. On one side was the gritty dystopia of Blade Runner, a neon Los Angeles soaked in polluted rain, pulsing with the nihilistic, hedonistic, capitalistic energy of proto-cyberpunk. On the other, Disney offered a near-future where computing was a bold a frontier. Both visions bore the fingerprints of Syd Mead, the futurist, and both productions focused on identity, and the semi-religious dynamic between Creator and Creation. Blade Runner has been dissected ad nauseam across our digital landscape, but for Tron it seems we're still lacking significant discourse.

The connection between the two films runs deeper than shared production DNA, though not to the same destination. Where Tron concerns itself with devotion, with what it means for a created being to believe in and fight for its maker, Blade Runner concerns itself with expiration. In Roy Batty and the replicants, it gives us synthetic beings confronting the fact that their creators built a ceiling into the architecture of their existence by design, and the entire plot is Roy fighting his way to Eldon Tyrell to demand more life. He gets his audience with his god. Tyrell, corporate and clinical, offers him nothing but elegant poetry about bright flames and short lives, and Roy kills him for it. The creator has nothing to give the creation except a beautiful explanation for why it has to die.

Forty-three years pass before the Tron franchise produces a story in direct and conscious conversation with that premise.

Ares is also on a timer. Twenty-nine minutes in the physical world before he de-resolves, a different flavor but the same cruelty, a leash, a safeguard, an overly complex electric fence, installed because it made the creation easier to control. Julian Dillinger introduces him to shareholders as the "perfect, expendable soldier,". A god who builds something expendable, says everything you need to know about the relationship on offer.

But where Roy Batty finds his creator and receives nothing, Ares finds his and receives everything. The Flynn who persists on the old Grid, spectral and generous and untethered from the corporate logic Julian represents, hands Ares the permanence code because Ares has demonstrated the desire to save someone else, rather than simply survive. Here two films, born in the same year from the same futurist's drafting table, finally diverge. Blade Runner tells the story of a synthetic being discovering its creator is bankrupt of grace. Tron: Ares, arriving generations later, proposes a different answer to the same question.

Roy Batty's final monologue, delivered on a rooftop in a downpour as his four years run out, remains one of cinema's great reflections on accumulated experience meeting a hard stop. All those moments, the attack ships, the Tannhauser Gate, real or implanted or somewhere in between, lost because the body was built to fail. The rain is a universe indifferent to the end of something that had, against every design intention, become truly alive.

Ares stands in the rain too. It happens within his first moments in the physical world, and the film holds on it with stillness that sits awkwardly against the action sequences surrounding it, a stillness some critics read as the film failing to earn its own emotional depth. I argue that stillness is exactly right, because what happens to Ares in that moment precisely inverts what happens to Roy in his.

Roy's rain is an ending, and Ares's rain is a beginning. Roy has run out of time to feel things, while Ares is feeling something for the first time, registering the physical world against a surface never designed to be moved by it, and being moved anyway. Where Roy's monologue mourns every experience about to be lost, Ares's rain is the first entry in a record that, with the permanence code, will never have to close. Two synthetic beings and two creators arrive at two very different answers to the question of whether the thing you made deserves to continue.

There is a moment in Tron: Ares that the film almost lets slip by without ceremony, which is either a failure of nerve or an act of genuine restraint. I'm of the second camp. Ares, the combat program built to be that perfect, expendable soldier, is inside ENCOM's Grid on a mission of corporate sabotage when he encounters an injured program in the wreckage of a fight he caused. He stops, tries to help, and Julian, watching from outside, immediately pulls him from the Grid. The whole system collapses behind him. "A weapon that hesitates is a defective weapon," and Dillinger reads the hesitation as a malfunction in Ares's code. What he cannot account for is the process Ares had already begun from his first moments standing in our world. He is being converted.

This is the moment the franchise has been building toward for over forty years. A program reaching toward another program in pain. That is the oldest story in the religious imagination: something made by a higher power develops a conscience the higher power did not authorize, thus the creation becomes a heretic. (Final Fantasy XVI, anyone?)

Ares arrives at rebellions through the real world, which programs in the Tron universe have always regarded as a divine realm, the territory of the Users whose existence gives programs their purpose and their theology. To his surprise and brief bewilderment, heaven turns out to be a place where things get wet, and cold, and broken, and the film treats his first contact with all of it as awestruck revelation.

Unlike his predecessor CLU, Ares doesn't build an army or overthrow the grid: He lies, once, to his second-in-command about Julian's whereabouts, then makes a private deal with the woman his Creator sent him to destroy. And then he walks away. Tron: Ares, has given a very straightforward roadmap to apostasy: the formal abandonment of a faith, enacted by no longer consenting to be defined by it.

That this story lands with the weight it does owes a great deal to the fact that the franchise spent its entire prior history constructing the religious framework Ares now dismantles. The original 01982 film established the User-Program dynamic as outright theology, specific and deliberate in its symbolism, embedded even at the level of character names. Tron: Legacy then complicated that theology by swapping its Christian architecture for a Buddhist one, moving from a world of sacrifice and divine intervention to a world of attachment, impermanence, and the impossibility of perfecting what was never meant to be perfect. Ares, arriving fifteen years later, inherits both frameworks and attempts something neither predecessor did. It asks, from the Program's perspective, what it costs to stop believing.

To understand what Ares is walking away from, you have to understand what the franchise built in the first place, and the original Tron built something more deliberate than it usually gets credit for.

The film arrived in a specific cultural moment. Televangelism was at a fever pitch. The Reagan coalition had made faith a political instrument the country was still adjusting to. And here was Disney, encoding a recognizably Christian theology into a film about video games, right down to the villains' names. Sark, the MCP's enforcer and the film's most visibly brutal presence, takes his name from the Greek sarx, the New Testament word for flesh, and specifically for the fallen dimension of human nature, the word Paul uses in Romans for the part of us constitutionally opposed to God. Lisberger named his devil after the theological concept the devil exploits.

The MCP is a familiar species of corrupt ecclesiastical power. Its ambition goes beyond denying the Users; part of its plan is to destroy religious belief in Users entirely and supplant them as the highest being. This is an institution that has decided the divine is a competitor rather than a source of authority. The MCP knows the Users are real, yet suppresses belief in them anyway. Every religious institution that has ever weaponized mystery to maintain control would recognize the logic immediately.

Against this, the film deploys two figures functioning as distinct but complementary religious archetypes. Tron is the warrior-saint. His entire existence is oriented toward the Users, he fights for them without ever having met them in the flesh, and his moment of receiving instruction from Alan at the I/O tower carries the full visual grammar of revelation: a beam of light descending from above, a voice from beyond the system, a program transformed by contact with something larger than itself. The communications tower functions as a church, its guardian Dumont as a priest, and the connection between Tron and Alan as divine revelation. The scene is filmed with reverence the rest of the movie never quite sustains, that shift is deliberate. Something holy is happening.

Flynn is the other archetype, and the more theologically interesting one. He is no saint. He is a User, which is to say he is God, or at minimum a god. The film remains very aware of what a complicated savior that makes him. Flynn descends from the real world into the data realm, is appalled by the rampant corruption and oppression surrounding him, and in a noble act of self-sacrifice leaps into the MCP's control beam to destroy it. Incarnation, ministry, sacrifice, a trinitarian setup echoing the Gospel. But Flynn also cheats at video games, runs an arcade, and when Tron assumes everything he does is part of a divine plan, waves it off entirely. "You guys know what it's like," he says. "You just keep doing what it looks like you're supposed to be doing, no matter how crazy it seems." Here is a god confessing that he has no more idea what he is doing than anyone else, and the film plants a seed that will take thirty years to fully bloom.

That tension, between the Programs' sincere devotion and the Users' human inadequacy, is what the original Tron holds in productive suspension. The programs who believe in their Users believe rightly, without a trace of delusion. The MCP persecutes them as religious fanatics precisely because their faith is true, and truth, in the hands of those with power over the system, is the most dangerous thing there is. Flynn enters the world and sacrifices himself. The MCP is destroyed and the faithful are liberated. A digital gospel, delivered to the viewing masses.

What the film cannot quite answer, and what the franchise would spend two more entries circling, is what happens to a theology built around creators who are real, present, and imperfect. The original Tron gives you the good news. The harder questions come later.