As a nerd of a certain age, I am of course familiar with all the nerd icons of the ’80s, and when it comes to cartoons, this is probably the big one. But unlike most nerds my age, I actually hated most of the ’80s nerd movies. I can’t stand Spaceballs, I dislike all the Muppet fantasy movies, and I’d never seen this. But some time ago, there was a sale on 4K discs that made this like $5 or something, and okay, I guess at some point I owe it to myself to watch it just for cultural literacy, if nothing else.

So expectations going in weren’t high, but I came out of it impressed.

The opening of the movie is the strongest part. It starts off in the ’70s with some kind of apparent nuclear explosion before jumping to the impossibly remote future of, uh, 2019. We’re in Neo-Tokyo, which is of course a cyberpunk world full of drugs and cool biker gangs and whatnot. It is such a retro-future, and I love it. We get to see our bunch of loser street punk kids get mixed up with some army stuff that’s really above their pay grade, complete with zombie kids with superpowers.

This takes us into a surprisingly nuanced (and unsurprisingly complex) political plot, with a military coup that plays out as more genuinely ambiguous than storybook good/evil — the colonel staging this coup isn’t a straight-up bad guy, and his reasons aren’t completely wrong… but it is a military coup, you know? This also all ties in to some light mysticism around how those kids got their superpowers, and a forbidden military research project. The political stuff works better than I expected it to; the mystical stuff works rather less well.

And that’s ultimately the part where the movie goes from potentially great to merely pretty good: The movie ends up devolving into some kind of Dragonball-ass fight that then segues into grandiose philosophizing. The pretentiousness is basically the failure mode of this kind of content — stuff aimed at teens who imagine that this is what Serious Literary Fiction is like (there are also some random cartoon boobs in there, presumably meant to similarly make the movie feel more adult).

Still, if the ending lets it down, there’s a lot of good stuff along the way; I can easily see why this was a major cultural touchstone for a generation of nerds.