quick review:

2898AD…when asking, ‘Why?’ seems to be the most illogical thing to do. Though, we as an audience are seasoned for that, right? But, 175/180 minutes of boredom! How are we to handle that?

Review

If you can believe that Tom Cruise defies death by jumping off high cliffs and tall buildings, what’s your problem with accepting Shah Rukh Khan doing it? If you can engage with dystopia from Hollywood, what’s your argument against a similar dystopia set in India? The thing is sometimes, it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. This time it doesn’t. I, for one, have lost interest, in gloomy dystopian set-ups, whether they are grey or sepia, like this one. Now, if it has an engaging narrative, then we are on! This one’s game is so off though.

The visual effects merging with the live action were jarring to begin with. Despite all my efforts, I couldn’t settle in with the comic strip aesthetic. The patchiness is the culprit—roughly and obviously treated voices, staggered-fragmented dialogue delivery, frog-like jumpy logic in the story-telling—are just some examples of the bumps added to the three-hour tour through the makers’ imagination of a world 874 years from now.

Sure, the treatment given to the vocals, both singing and speaking, might have come across as jarring to me because I watched a dubbed show in Hindi. The same can be partly blamed for the dialogue delivery too. But the plot skipping two steps in logic, and sometimes ten and a half, is extremely difficult to get over.

Ironically, this stands out even more because the movie does some bits well every once in a while. How we come to know what is becoming of the women in confinement is done well, for instance. I also liked the idea of the impact of an evil person’s tears. Is “Complex” made to sound like “Congress” intentionally, or is that just a coincidence? If the latter, then a catchphrase I caught must also be a fluke, right?

Some references—to Mahabharata, obviously, some of which work like a person gambling dear ones away; or like how the good and evil of the past have to come together to save the world; or to Christianity like with immaculate conception—are done subtly enough contrary to the rest of the film’s tone. There is no subtlety with the Buddhist iconography though and some religions are conspicuous by their absence.

So yeah, that is pretty much it. You can barely talk about the good without running into the unenjoyable. For other problems and problematic issues loom larger. Like the rather crass remark on feminism. Let alone that, right why-oh-why was Roxy played by Disha Patani in the film?!

It’s telling, right? That the only actor-character I feel like talking about, is the one who is on screen for all of 6.895 minutes. Not that Deepika Padukone or Prabhas aren’t noticeable. Just that these roles are likely to be easier than doing in their sleep for any actor, let alone them. Of course, Amitabh Bachchan’s breath alone, which is how he is introduced, makes his baritone’s presence felt, and how! No one is complaining. Come on, I mean, he is convincing as a 6,000-year-old, no extra zeroes there.

If only he wasn’t involved in one boring, slow fight sequence after another. If only the film didn’t have one boring, excruciatingly slow, and awfully choreographed action scene after another.

That brings me back to what I started with. The problem with being like films from outside India is ok when there is contextualisation. But if you are just going to make one of your main characters look and behave like one of the not-so-main characters from Dune, it feels like you don’t believe in your creativity. It’s not that it doesn’t exist, creativity, you see glimpses of it. Just that it is nowhere close to being enough.

– meeta, a part of the audience