Worth the wait

IT's very hard to summarise something profound and amazing in just three words. 'I love you' and 'It's a boy' are some of the obvious but after seeing Tron Legacy, the best I can do is 'It's The Dude'!

Jeff Bridges, who rose to cult status after starring as The Dude in the Big Lebowski (a movie which GulfWeekly reporter Shilpa Chandran assures me she'll watch ... one day), has an unmistakable and dynamic acting style and his smooth and effortlessly cool persona is perfectly suited for his role in Tron:Legacy.

Back in 1982, Michael Jackson was black, Madonna was violating people's ear drums with her music and a film called Tron was released. I did a 'Shilpa' and never got round to seeing it, but now, after seeing the sequel there is more reason to see it than ever.

In 1989, Kevin Flynn, an innovative software engineer who just so happens to be CEO of a massive company, suddenly disappeared. Now, 20 years later his son, Sam, who took control of his father's shares, has surprisingly little interest in the company ... he just wants to know what happened.

Upon a visit from his father's old friend, he is urged to check out some random pager messages that have been coming from Flynn's old arcade. Unable to resist a lead that could reunite him with his estranged father, Sam takes up the challenge and a whole world of adventure is unleashed when he stumbles into a hidden computer lab at the arcade.

Fiddling with a computer you don't understand can often do more harm than good. Thankfully, we have some computer-savvy guys that work for this paper to help us avoid those kind of problems, but poor Sam, with all his money, decides he's into a bit of DIY.

As a result, he's transported into the grid, a virtual world of his father's design, and quickly taken to the game area to compete in a range of deadly trials. The programmes (visually represented with projections of people) discover that Sam is a user and take him to Clu. Imagine Sam's shock when Clu is the spitting image of his father, well, a digital copy anyway! Clu just so happens to rule the grid with an iron fist and, unfortunately, there is no nepotism for young Sam.

I was amazed with the correlation and irony between ruling the grid and ruling the company, and credit goes to the Dude for his ability to bring a sense of seriousness to an often ridiculously unreal character.

Sam is taken to a mysterious hideout off the grid and we see the father-son reunion we were cheated out of earlier. Yes, his real father is there and has been living in the grid for years. He tells Sam that Clu betrayed him, took control of the grid and forced him to go into hiding ... I guess he's the evil twin.

Bridges does a fantastic job switching from hero to villain and it's like watching two different people on screen ... and he didn't even use the word dude! While Kevin is charming and cool, Clu is hard and cruel and has committed genocide on programmes that worked to unlock mysteries in religion, medicine and science, maybe, could have found the cure for cancer ... overall he's pretty bad.

When Kevin went into the grid, the portal closed and was reopened when Sam came in 20 years later.

Now, there is only a small window of opportunity to get out or they'll both be trapped. With a little help from a well-placed warrior called Quorra, the father and son take a life-or-death journey across Kevin's universe, pursued by deadly villains hell bent on preventing their escape.

The rest of the movie can be described as action and special effects galore with some mind-blowing sequences that put the graphics in Avatar to shame.

In my opinion, you cannot help but love this movie. It's fast-paced, action-packed, well-written, flawlessly acted out and is in the running for my pick as the best film of 2010.

Showing in Cineco, Seef II and Saar Cineplex