Tag Archives: Prabhas

Movie Review: Adipurush (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

This is a review of the Hindi version of Adipurush streaming on Netflix.

Adipurush reaches for the stars and falls well short, resulting in a film that looks bad and feels slow.

I acknowledge that I am not the target audience for Adipurush. The film opens with an onscreen note explaining that it is a devotional work, with the Hindu faithful as the presumptive audience for this retelling of a portion of the epic Ramayana. I’m familiar with the tale of Sita’s abduction by Ravana and her rescue by Rama, but the version presented in Adipurush is told somewhat out of sequence, with the assumption that everyone watching already knows all the details about this story, as well as Hindu cosmology more generally. Also, all of the characters go by aliases in the film.

That said, my issues with Adipurush have to do with the film’s execution, and not a misunderstanding of the material.

Prabhas plays Raghava, a prince who lives in the jungle in exile with his wife Janaki (Kriti Sanon) and his brother Shesh (Sunny Singh). The demoness Shurpanakha (Tejaswini Pandit) is enamored of Raghava, but he spurns her. She returns to the kingdom of Lanka and convinces her brother Lankesh (Saif Ali Khan) — king of the demons and a giant with many heads — to kidnap Janaki. Lankesh succeeds through trickery, forcing Raghava to seek aid from a race of forest-dwelling ape-men called the Vanara in order to get Janaki back.

Stylistically, Adipurush is a mashup of Lord of the Rings, Baahubali, and the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. Lanka and its castle look like Sauron’s fortress in Mordor, complete with trolls manning the gates. Fanciful elements like a swan boat call back to Baahubali. The Vanara look like they could be Caesar’s long-lost cousins.

But Adipurush doesn’t come close to matching the quality of the movies that serve as its inspiration. Writer-director Om Raut tries to execute his vision on such a grand scale that the visual effects can’t keep up. Instead of having dozens of creepy bats or specters that look cool, he opts for hundreds of bats and specters that look bad. Rather than ask his VFX team to animate hundreds of ape warriors with enough texture to look believable, he has them animate tens of thousands that look like low-budget cartoons.

The onscreen human actors don’t feel as though they are operating within a real physical environment, and practical effects are rarely used. There’s some kind of filter or post-production treatment done to Prabhas’s face that makes him look like a cartoon. It’s distracting because none of the other human actors are given such treatment (though it would be hard to tell with Shesh because Singh uses only one facial expression throughout the entire film).

Visual shortcomings might be overlooked if the story was told at a fast pace, but Raut loves slow motion. The characters often move in slow motion, giving the audience plenty of time to linger on the subpar visuals while being bored stiff. This pacing hinders what Prabhas can do with his performance. Same goes for Sanon, to a lesser degree. She does get a few good scenes with Khan, who takes advantage of the chance to play a larger-than-life villain and seems to enjoy himself.

Given that Adipurush presently ranks as one of the most expensive Indian movies of all time, the quality of the finished product is underwhelming. In order to execute his vision given whatever constraints he was working under, Raut would have been more successful making an animated movie. Better that than a live-action film that looks cartoonish.

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Movie Review: Baahubali 2 — The Conclusion (2017)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Buy Baahubali 2 in Hindi, Malayalam, or Tamil at iTunes
Buy the Blu-ray or DVD from Amazon
Buy the soundtrack at iTunes

The whole reason I go to the movies is for the rare opportunity to watch a film as engrossing and magical as Baahubali 2: The Conclusion. Together with its predecessor, Baahubali: The Beginning, the Baahubali films are works of tremendous artistic achievement.

As the subtitles of the Baahubali (“The One with Strong Arms“) films suggest, they combine to form a single narrative and don’t work well as standalone films. There’s a tiny summary of the events of the first film at the opening of The Conclusion, but only enough to refresh the memories of those who’ve seen the original. It’s inadvisable to watch The Conclusion without first watching The Beginning (which is readily available for purchase/rent in the US via iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

With The Beginning having established the origin of the present-day hero, Shivudu (Prabhas), the prowess of his Herculean father Baahubali (also Prabhas), as well as the specific tragedy that tore apart the kingdom of Mahishmati, The Conclusion fills in the details of what led to the tragedy. As in so many epics, it was a fight over a woman.

That woman is Devasena (Anushka Shetty), who appears in The Beginning after suffering decades of torture at the hands of the king of Mahishmati, Ballaladeva (Rana Daggubati), Baahubali’s brother. The Conclusion shows Devasena in her youth, a beautiful princess with fearsome battle skills.

Baahubali meets Devasena as he and Kattappa (Sathyaraj) travel the countryside in disguise. When Baahubali falls for Devasena, it is as much for her strong will and sense of justice as for her looks. On the other hand, Ballaladeva decides to marry Devasena after merely seeing her portrait, without even laying eyes on her in person.

In The Beginning, the female warrior Avantika (Tamannaah Bhatia) waas ultimately sidelined by Shivudu after he literally washes the grime of battle from her so she will comport to his idealized vision of pristine loveliness. The women in The Conclusion have more agency and are accepted on their own terms. Devasena won’t take guff from anyone, no matter their rank. Queen regent Sivagami (Ramya Krishnan) is the embodiment of power, her eyes flashing with rage when the honor of Mahishmati is threatened. It’s gratifying to see two such authoritative female characters in a movie whose title refers specifically to physical strength. (Avantika rejoins the fray in The Conclusion in a satisfying return to her former martial glory.)

There is, of course, plenty of physical strength on display in the film. Prabhas is a physical specimen, and Daggubati looks like a titan. A shirtless battle between the two hulks is as satisfying as it is inevitable. Legendary fighter Kattappa is no slouch either, as showcased by Satyaraja’s nimble moves.

One newly introduced character in The Conclusion is particularly memorable. Devasena’s brother-in-law, Kumara Verma (Subbaraju), is in many ways a stand in for the audience as one of the few mere mortals in this world of demi-gods. He’s pompous and cowardly, and primarily the butt of jokes in the film, yet he rises to the challenge in a critical moment, proving Baahubali’s assertion that courage is more important than strength.

The joy of both Baahubali films — but especially the second one — is that they can be watched either purely for enjoyment’s sake or for the fun of parsing every minute detail, picking out all of the myriad influences. The story is borne out of traditions from across the globe, beyond its obvious roots in Indian religion, history, and mythology. The disguise sequence is Shakespearean. Song lyrics like, “Heart stealer, eternal enchanter” sound like epithets from Greek mythology like “Hector, breaker of horses.”

[The team behind the English subtitles deserves special kudos for their precise choices and linguistic flourishes, such as this memorable lyric: “The sky says ‘bravo’ with infectious esprit.”]

There are also modern influences. When Baahubali fights, he moves more like a video game character than a movie character. Large battle sequences clearly draw from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’d argue that the Baahubali movies are the most effective cinematic fantasy epics since LOTR.

I’d further argue that the Baahubali movies succeed in that regard precisely because they were made with greater budget constraints than similar Hollywood movies. Huge numbers of extras in brilliantly colored costumes give a life to crowd scenes that is missing from most CGI-heavy contemporary fare. Director S.S. Rajamouli employs his resources in a way that achieves a consistency of look, which in fantasy films is more important than realism.

Most importantly, Rajamouli and writer Vijayendra Prasad create a world of such detail and depth that one might forget that they did in fact create it. It feels real, like an alternative history of the world. It’s so easy to be swept up by Baahubali 2, to imagine a world of superheroes who believe in justice and mercy above all else. It’s wonderful.

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Thoughts on Baahubali

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I write about Hindi-language movies almost exclusively at this site, but I have to make an exception for Baahubali: The Beginning. The Telugu-Tamil fantasy film became such a huge success internationally — with collections in North America alone well above $8 million — that producers commissioned a special edition of the film for international audiences. Editor Vincent Tabaillon is tasked with trimming the nearly three-hour epic for screening at festivals and shopping to distributors. I’m hopeful that the new edition will get a run in the US, even after we already got the original version. Baahubali is a movie that needs to be seen by as many people as possible.

I adore Baahubali. The world created by SS Rajamouli is so vast and colorful that it feels like a video game mashup. Its hero, Shivudu, is a superpowered version of Uncharted‘s Nathan Drake, but with beefier arms and no guns. Shivudu leaves his jungle home by climbing a massive waterfall, and then finding snowy fields that border an ancient metropolis, giving the feeling of progressing through the levels of a Japanese role playing game (e.g., Xenoblade Chronicles).

And if gorgeous settings, political intrigue, and epic battles aren’t incentive enough, stars Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, and Tamannaah Bhatia are all fabulous looking.

When considering the film’s re-edit, the most obvious material for Tabaillon to excise are battles and musical numbers. As cool as the giant battle in the second half of the film is, it goes on for a really long time. It’s possible to maintain a sense of the battle’s scale while trimming it rather significantly. As for the music, I’d personally prefer to see as much of it retained as possible, since the soundtrack is incredible — especially “Dhirava“.

Assuming that the goal of the Baahubali re-edit is to reach new fans who don’t otherwise watch Indian films, there are a couple of issues that could surprise or offend Western audiences, and I’m not sure they’ll be able to be satisfactorily addressed in the editing process. First is Shivudu’s “courtship” of Avanthika. Rather than just talk to her, he sneaks up on her twice and tattoos her. Not only is it creepy, but he doesn’t seem to appreciate that his actions endanger her and threaten her standing among her people. And, no, this isn’t just a case of American political correctness imposing itself on another culture. Indian critic Anna MM Vetticad wrote a thorough takedown of the sequence, going so far as to call it rape.

Another issue is the way the movie addresses skin color. Bollywood has a preference for fair-skinned heroines, and the US does more than its share of whitewashing in movies and TV shows, so it’s a common problem. But Baahubali uses makeup in some overt ways that send the message that light skin is good, dark skin is bad.

Avanthika first appears to Shivudu in a vision as a pale apparition who entices him to climb the waterfall. When he sees her in reality, she’s a warrior with sun-baked skin. During their love song, he dips her under a waterfall, washing away her tan so she looks like the pale goddess of his imagination. He isn’t content to love her the way she is. He wants his dream girl, and his dream girl is fair.

On the flip side, the villains who attack the kingdom in the film’s second half are played by actors covered entirely in black makeup. It’s not clearly identified as some kind of war paint, so this appears to be blackface on a massive scale. While blackface doesn’t have the same stigma in Indian films that it does elsewhere in the world, Western audiences — Americans especially — will cringe when they see this.

It would be difficult to make changes to the thousands of warriors who fight for the bad guys, but perhaps some CGI makeup effects could be added to the rival chieftain to make it clear that this is battle regalia, and not a bunch of lighter-skinned actors dressing up as “evil” black guys.

Nevertheless, I think Baahubali is a tremendous achievement, especially considering that it cost less to produce than most American romantic comedies. Hollywood studios are foolish if they don’t offer Rajamouli a superhero franchise to direct. I’m excited that new audiences will get to experience Baahubali thanks to this re-edit. More than anything, I can’t wait until the release of Baahubali: The Conclusion in 2016!