The worst movie of the year and a new low for Disney

Sci-fi sequel 'Tron: Ares' is an ethically dubious, horribly written nadir in franchise slop, says Clarisse Loughrey. Elsewhere, Keira Knightley falls victim to cabin fever

- Clarisse Loughrey

Here's a novel scenario: the year's best score was written for the year's worst film. It creates, in turn, a kind of inescapable, torturous psychic loop: the brain starts to stall as each technobabble line of dialogue and drab narrative turn of Tron: Ares enters the processing centres, only for it to be periodically zapped back into consciousness when a new track by rock outfit Nine Inch Nails starts vibrating the butt cheeks. From despair to euphoria, despair to euphoria, on and on.

The band’s permanent members, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, have been regularly co-scoring films since The Social Network – mostly for David Fincher, occasionally for Luca Guadagnino (as in last year’s Challengers). Tron: Ares is the first time they’ve provided a score as Nine Inch Nails, inheriting duties from the now-disbanded Daft Punk, whose Gallic beeps littered the previous Tron film, 2010’s Legacy.

And this, in whatever way can be distinguished, feels like a Nine Inch Nails score versus a Reznor and Ross one. Not only do Reznor’s agonised vocals creep into a key action sequence, but the whole affair carries the band’s raw, erotic drive, the industrial grinding of its bass lines played against lighter, more intricate motifs circling around each other like lines of code or a genetic double helix.

You're listening to all this, though, while actively looking at the most disposable franchise fodder imaginable. Tron: Ares has the visual flair of a mobile game and a thematic depth that makes the 1982 original’s premise – Jeff Bridges gets sucked into a computer – feel like it was written by philosophers.