TRON: Ares [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]

For while this might be an electronically-driven score, there are so many human touches that the power of the artist, not the medium, shines through. Which is the best possible soundtrack for a movie that aims to examine what it means to be alive.

Visceral, engaging, and potent enough to warrant the Nine Inch Nails name, Tron: Ares is one of the standout soundtracks in the Reznor/Ross catalog, one that mirrors its subject by taking something digital and transforming it into something very human and emotional.

The results plugs directly into Tron's AI-apocalypse mainframe. It's the end of teh world as we know it, essentially, but NIN fit in just fine. [Christmas 2025, p.134]

The pleasure of the people playing this music is obvious and infectious, but it’s hard to shake the idea that despite their effectiveness, the hardest-charging songs here feel incomplete, that the film score’s mandate not to draw too much attention to itself hampers the songs’ ability to fully bloom on their own terms.

Only a masochist would sit down and listen to the whole hour-plus of this front to back — which means it’s perfectly targeted for Nine Inch Nail’s core audience. Taken in isolation, some of its best moments — like the Erik Satie-gone-Cylon “Echoes” and the slinky, bass-bomb implosion “Infiltrator” — present nice twists on the tension between of all-too-human hunger and android angst Reznor has been playing with for decades.