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.
