Adipurush: Bloated Ramayana With Bad VFX

Adipurush: A Bloated Take On The Ramayana, With Jarring VFX

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows. Today: Adipurush.

Dir: Om Raut

Cast: Prabhas, Saif Ali Khan

Playing in: Theatres

ON paper, Om Raut’s Adipurush, a retelling of the Ramayana, has been in the making for three years. But in reality, the film has been in the making for a while, gestating in India’s current political climate. Valmiki’s work, that centers on the righteousness of Lord Rama, has sustained less as an epic and more as a war cry, with the central figure co-opted as an aggressive Hindu deity in a country that is increasingly becoming saffronised. This distortion, in turn, has lent a fatigue to the epic, which is a shame because when viewed in isolation, it is a rapturous work of storytelling with characters so well-rounded that even when the narrative is designed as good versus evil, the reading it encourages is never that simple. On paper (again), the prospect of a film on the Ramayana presented the possibility of underlining its appeal without an agenda. But Raut’s outing not only hinges on the binaries but also is designed around them, milking the impending confrontation of Ram and Ravana to blast “Jai Siya Ram” at least 266 times.

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Adipurush: Bloated Ramayana With Bad VFX

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