Brian Eno's classic quote about The Velvet Underground was that only 10,000 people bought their first album, but every one of them went out and formed a band. A similar sentiment also applies to Disney's 1982 sci-fi adventure Tron, a Jeff Bridges-starring cult favourite whose impact has far exceeded its box office take.
It's 15 years since the last Tron instalment, Tron: Legacy, a hiatus during which you could be forgiven for viewing Tron as a franchise that time forgot. But here we are with a new adventure that's better than its predecessor and which suggests there's more life in this IP yet.
Past Lives star Greta Lee plays Eve Kim, the current CEO of ENCOM, the big-tech company once run by Bridges' "computer genius" Kevin Flynn way back when. Eve is in search of Flynn's Permanence Code - the Holy Grail that would allow digital entities to exist in real life. Her competition is Dillinger Systems' mother-and-son duo Elisabeth and Julian Dillinger (Gillian Anderson and Evan Peters). Eve sees AI as a force for good; the Dillingers are all about its military potential.
Enter Ares (Jared Leto), Julian Dillinger's super-intelligent programme that can now exist in the real world for close to 30 minutes. Ares is tasked with stealing code from Eve. There's a fair whack of backstory, but that's the gist.
On a visual level alone, Tron: Ares is worth seeing on the biggest screen that you can. It looks stunning - better to these eyes than any other effects-driven film this year - and surely a rake of Oscar nominations are in the offing (Tron infamously missed out on a special effects nod in 1983). The set-pieces, soundtracked in banging fashion by Nine Inch Nails, are another big win for director Joachim Rønning (Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales), with the pacing suitably slick to boot.
Where the film disappoints is that there was extra bandwidth for Starmanesque laughs and tender moments involving Lee and Leto's characters. The life-affirming properties of one particular gag involving Depeche Mode are glorious and will make you feel like a teenager again. Just can't get enough, indeed.
Refreshingly, Tron: Ares closes not with a cliffhanger but on a message of hope - and hopefully Disney won't leave it until 2040 for more.
