Joachim Rønning is a careful, well-mannered director of adventure films who hires good people and is at his best on open water. Handed a studio franchise, he delivers something handsome with nothing much to say; we would rather see him on a raft.
Fi1m perspective
The best thing in TRON: Ares (2025) is a chase, and the best thing in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) is a robbery. Joachim Rønning stages both the way a man raised on Spielberg and Zemeckis would: the geography is plain, the vehicles do the talking, and it is over before it wears out its welcome. Around each sits a long film full of people explaining things and a script that never works out what it wants. That is his studio career so far: one good set piece in a franchise that only asked him to be competent.
He came up in Norway with Espen Sandberg, a childhood friend. The two made shorts and commercials under the name Roenberg, then features together: Bandidas (2006), a Western comedy; Max Manus: Man of War (2008), a Second World War drama; and Kon-Tiki (2012), the raft across the Pacific that got them noticed abroad and, after it, a call from Jerry Bruckheimer. The partnership ended, amicably by all accounts, after Pirates, and Rønning has worked alone since: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), Young Woman and the Sea (2024), shot largely on open water, and TRON: Ares.
The pattern is easy to read. Give him a true story and a body of water and he is patient and practical; that is what admirers of Kon-Tiki and Young Woman and the Sea praise, and we have no reason to doubt them. Give him a franchise and he becomes a good foreman. He and Sandberg were brought in to get Pirates back on the water and down to a sensible length, and at 129 minutes they managed the second, while Jeff Nathanson's script ran the first film again with the life let out and Johnny Depp did an impression of himself. Javier Bardem, at least, earned his floating fringe. In TRON: Ares the hiring is again impeccable. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross wrote the best thing in the film by some distance, the photography is handsome, and Jared Leto, asked what a machine would want out here, declines to answer. Rønning gives every department room and lets the script say almost nothing, several times.
We sat up for that chase, which is cut clean and knows where everything is, and then we spent the last stretch of TRON: Ares waiting for the film to say something it had already failed to say twice, and by the end we were bored and faintly cross about it. Nothing in it is lazy, which is the frustrating part. It is the work of someone who takes the job seriously and does not seem to have asked what the film was for.
The Norwegian films and the one on the sea suggest a director who likes real weather and real distance and knows how to shoot both. The studio films suggest one who will do what he is asked, and do it well. Somebody should give him a boat and a true story with no franchise attached, and then we would like to see what he does.
Biography
Joachim Rønning is a Norwegian film director. He grew up in Sandefjord and attended Stockholms Filmskola in Sweden from 1992 to 1994. He began his professional career directing with childhood friend Espen Sandberg, with whom he co-directed several early features.
Rønning's credits include Bandidas (2006) and Max Manus: Man of War (2008), both co-directed with Sandberg; Kon-Tiki (2012); Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017); Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019); Young Woman and the Sea (2024); and TRON: Ares (2025). He also directed episodes of the series Marco Polo (2014).
