Ladies and gentlemen, please stand up and pay your obeisance, for a new movie genre is born—the Sci-fi Musical. Or the Sci-fi Masala. Or perhaps the Sci-fi Spectacular.
I am truly speechless. As was the rest of audience who watched today’s preview show with me. It is saying a lot, because watching a Rajni movie with a Tamil crowd means you hardly get to hear the dialogues and return home with a ruptured eardrum from all the screams, whistles and applause.
Shankar’s latest outing is truly a paradigm shift in Sci-fi movies. This ambitious, intelligent, witty an entertaining movie picks up where the Terminators, Star Wars, Iron Men, and X-Men of the world left off and shoots off into the stratosphere. True, the film is homage to all these movies—a lot of you will have a great time spotting all the references, like the R2 robot.
But you want CGI? Oh we got CGI baby! 3X size! I haven’t seen anything like that climax in my life—I am still shaking with the adrenaline rush!
You want action? How much? You want cars, trucks, buildings, and aircrafts blown up? No problem. You want body count that rivals Rambo? Jujube—as Rajni would say.
You want outlandish costumes, unbelievable locations, and grand music? Duh! This is a Shankar-Rahman-Rajni movie, remember? They have scaled Machu Pichu to bring you a song that you will not forget that easily.
The movie is take-no-prisoners high tech. Shankar doesn’t stop to explain what robotics, android-humanoid, artificial intelligence, neural schema, electromagnetism, wi-fi streaming, and worm are. Yet all these are important to the plot movement and denouement. You have to agree that this is unheard of in Indian movies.
Even the jokes are high tech. A policeman corners the robot in the hope of hustling some money off him. So he tries to ruffle the robot by asking his name, address etc. Robot replies: “I only have an IP address: 208.100…” You get it or you die, for all the director cares.
Story-wise, Shankar has stayed within the classic framework of sci-fi: rogue robot turns against his creator, creates an army of robots, and tries to take over humanity, but humans prevail. Where Shankar triumphs is that he keeps the story in Chennai and the cause and effect small scale and native. So there is at once a certain credibility built into the narrative.
Not that you are complaining. You are too busy being stunned by what is unfolding in front of your eyes to care that it is a complete Rajni vehicle, with all other characters having practically walk on roles.
In the danger of being lynched, I shall table it that I am not a Rajni fan. I come from a family that is staunchly Kamal supporting for three generations. I have watched exactly four Rajni movies in the theaters in my entire life.
So this is not the usual Tamil exuberance talking when I say Rajni shines in the movie. He is terribly convincing as the Carnegie-Mellon-MIT bred robotics engineer, so comfortable he is mouthing all those tricky lines.
But he excels as the villainous Robot. He does a studied and nuanced portrayal of the transformation from a mere machine to a naïve, child-like artificially intelligent robot to the demonic antagonist. There are so many memorable scenes, like the scene where he first gets angry. Or the one where he starts getting attracted to Ash. Or the scene where he starts spouting poetry when his creator takes him for a presentation to the army. He is of course on his home stretch in the second half playing the nefarious robot, for he started his career in villain roles.
It is reported that this is going to be Rajni’s last outing as a main hero and he plans to do age-appropriate roles from now on. What a way to bow out, dude!
I pity all those people who are going to watch this movie in languages other than Tamil because you are going to miss all the exceedingly clever and contemporary lyrics. Vairamuthu is one of the finest free verse poets in Tamil today. His style is to use startling juxtaposition of thoughts and genres; to give you a whole new vision within a terse line of poetry. He is practically untranslatable.
In this movie, he has gone ballistic. His lyrics refer to Isaac Asimov, Isaac Newton and Einstein; it is peppered with electrons, neutrons, and other sundry quarks; the robot’s fire of love doesn’t get doused with the waters of Atlantic Ocean; and he wonders whether the lady’s love is the force as defined by Newton’s laws.
A.R.Rahman delivers. Three songs are fantastic: Arima, Kilimanjaro, and Irumbile Oru.
Ash is the most irritating thing about the movie. She is so unimaginative as an actress that she kills certain important scenes. But she looks breathtaking in all those out-of-the-world costumes and dances very well. A lot of characters kind of don’t know what to do, like the legion of policemen. But again, doesn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered to me was the tacky 3D animation in that birth scene. I don't know why corners were cut in a movie in which a Merc Convertible was totaled.
One thought was shared by a lot of people as we walked out of the theater: “Will people get this movie?” We’ll have to wait and watch whether the Indian audience takes to the sci-fi genre of this nature.
As for the title of this review—watch the movie.
I am truly speechless. As was the rest of audience who watched today’s preview show with me. It is saying a lot, because watching a Rajni movie with a Tamil crowd means you hardly get to hear the dialogues and return home with a ruptured eardrum from all the screams, whistles and applause.
Shankar’s latest outing is truly a paradigm shift in Sci-fi movies. This ambitious, intelligent, witty an entertaining movie picks up where the Terminators, Star Wars, Iron Men, and X-Men of the world left off and shoots off into the stratosphere. True, the film is homage to all these movies—a lot of you will have a great time spotting all the references, like the R2 robot.
But you want CGI? Oh we got CGI baby! 3X size! I haven’t seen anything like that climax in my life—I am still shaking with the adrenaline rush!
You want action? How much? You want cars, trucks, buildings, and aircrafts blown up? No problem. You want body count that rivals Rambo? Jujube—as Rajni would say.
You want outlandish costumes, unbelievable locations, and grand music? Duh! This is a Shankar-Rahman-Rajni movie, remember? They have scaled Machu Pichu to bring you a song that you will not forget that easily.
The movie is take-no-prisoners high tech. Shankar doesn’t stop to explain what robotics, android-humanoid, artificial intelligence, neural schema, electromagnetism, wi-fi streaming, and worm are. Yet all these are important to the plot movement and denouement. You have to agree that this is unheard of in Indian movies.
Even the jokes are high tech. A policeman corners the robot in the hope of hustling some money off him. So he tries to ruffle the robot by asking his name, address etc. Robot replies: “I only have an IP address: 208.100…” You get it or you die, for all the director cares.
Story-wise, Shankar has stayed within the classic framework of sci-fi: rogue robot turns against his creator, creates an army of robots, and tries to take over humanity, but humans prevail. Where Shankar triumphs is that he keeps the story in Chennai and the cause and effect small scale and native. So there is at once a certain credibility built into the narrative.
Not that you are complaining. You are too busy being stunned by what is unfolding in front of your eyes to care that it is a complete Rajni vehicle, with all other characters having practically walk on roles.
In the danger of being lynched, I shall table it that I am not a Rajni fan. I come from a family that is staunchly Kamal supporting for three generations. I have watched exactly four Rajni movies in the theaters in my entire life.
So this is not the usual Tamil exuberance talking when I say Rajni shines in the movie. He is terribly convincing as the Carnegie-Mellon-MIT bred robotics engineer, so comfortable he is mouthing all those tricky lines.
But he excels as the villainous Robot. He does a studied and nuanced portrayal of the transformation from a mere machine to a naïve, child-like artificially intelligent robot to the demonic antagonist. There are so many memorable scenes, like the scene where he first gets angry. Or the one where he starts getting attracted to Ash. Or the scene where he starts spouting poetry when his creator takes him for a presentation to the army. He is of course on his home stretch in the second half playing the nefarious robot, for he started his career in villain roles.
It is reported that this is going to be Rajni’s last outing as a main hero and he plans to do age-appropriate roles from now on. What a way to bow out, dude!
I pity all those people who are going to watch this movie in languages other than Tamil because you are going to miss all the exceedingly clever and contemporary lyrics. Vairamuthu is one of the finest free verse poets in Tamil today. His style is to use startling juxtaposition of thoughts and genres; to give you a whole new vision within a terse line of poetry. He is practically untranslatable.
In this movie, he has gone ballistic. His lyrics refer to Isaac Asimov, Isaac Newton and Einstein; it is peppered with electrons, neutrons, and other sundry quarks; the robot’s fire of love doesn’t get doused with the waters of Atlantic Ocean; and he wonders whether the lady’s love is the force as defined by Newton’s laws.
A.R.Rahman delivers. Three songs are fantastic: Arima, Kilimanjaro, and Irumbile Oru.
Ash is the most irritating thing about the movie. She is so unimaginative as an actress that she kills certain important scenes. But she looks breathtaking in all those out-of-the-world costumes and dances very well. A lot of characters kind of don’t know what to do, like the legion of policemen. But again, doesn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered to me was the tacky 3D animation in that birth scene. I don't know why corners were cut in a movie in which a Merc Convertible was totaled.
One thought was shared by a lot of people as we walked out of the theater: “Will people get this movie?” We’ll have to wait and watch whether the Indian audience takes to the sci-fi genre of this nature.
As for the title of this review—watch the movie.
Comments
plaited and removed the pedal
(pinni Pedal eduthuteenge...)
"plaited and removed the pedal"
(pinni Pedal eduthuteenge...)
- badri