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. |
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| | Cast: Prabhas, Saif Ali Khan |
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| 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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The Flash: A Fun Superhero Film That Shies Away From Cinematic Depth |
THE most frustrating thing about a Modern Superhero Movie is that proper high-concept devices — like time-travel, alternate realities, butterfly effect, memory science, the linearity of living and feeling — get the studio-tentpole makeover. No matter how novel a comic-book superhero film sets out to be, you know that ultimately it’s the IP (Intellectual Property) that will temper its freedom. It’s the Marvel and DC stamps that will require some blatant superheroing, some tonal cliches, some hybrid of self-reverential and self-referential humour, some cameos, some nostalgia, some climactic chaos. In its own parlance, the IP is the canon that keeps the film adaptations from straying too far — or getting too smart. At some point, those roots morph into shackles. — RAHUL DESAI |
| Black Mirror: For 6th Season, Charlie Brooker's Show Turns Camera On Itself |
DEEPFAKES are spreading disinformation, propaganda and revenge porn at a rate countermeasures haven’t been able to keep up with. More than one country ended up electing a cartoon figurehead, prone to incendiary rhetoric, as their leader. Artists and writers could lose their jobs to generative AI. The march of technology is outpacing our ability to adapt to its unprecedented disruptions. Reality is threatening to derail the speculative fiction vehicle entire. At once expanding and fraying at the seams, the world as we know it is Black Mirror-ing pretty hard already. So, how does TV’s premier SF auteur Charlie Brooker extend the shelf life of his anthology series and not fall behind? By turning the camera inwards. — PRAHLAD SRIHARI |
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Extraction 2 Is Another Stale Brick In The Streaming Wall |
WHEN did Hollywood actioners become so…boring? That’s not a rhetorical question. The answer: Since the Russo Brothers started blowing things up on screen. Forget the Marvel films, my beef is with titles like The Gray Man, Citadel, Extraction and now Extraction 2. These are so singularly forgettable — so consistently interchangeable — that I’m starting to miss Michael Bay’s monopoly over the Dumb Action Movie. There were times during this big-budget Netflix sequel that I actually lost interest *mid-way* through an action set piece. I normally yawn before or after such moments — you know, during the clunky set-ups and half-baked story-building — but here my yawns coincided with burning helicopters, incompetent bullets, bone-crunching combat, rogue fires and, believe it or not, a 21-minute one-take action scene. It’s not that the choreography isn’t good. It is (mostly), and props to the performers and technical teams; the problem is one of overkill. When everything is crazy, nothing is crazy anymore. — R.D. |
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