Ramayana: Rise of a Legend is in theaters beginning Nov. 5.
Hindi cinema has long looked to Hollywood as a benchmark for big-screen action; much of its 21st century style, for instance, was inspired by Mission: Impossible 2. Ramayana: Rise of a Legend re-imagines the resplendent Hindu epic as a CGI-laden blockbuster at a time when the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the de facto touchstone for big-budget adaptations. In that vein, Nitesh Tiwari’s undertaking does, in fact, resemble a Marvel movie. Unfortunately, that Marvel movie happens to be Thor: Love and Thunder, a much-derided film whose floating head VFX had to be famously reworked.
This resemblance takes hold in an early scene, in which the epic’s antagonist, Ravana (charismatic Toxic star Yash), prays atop a cliff to the creator-god Brahma, whose countenance takes the form of a disembodied constellation with an overly-expressive digital mouth. This excess fluidity is owed, in part, to the movie’s uncanny English dub, which was shown to press in the United States in lieu of the original Hindi version (which happens to be 18 minutes longer than this 162-minute cut). Rather than traditional dubbing, the filmmakers developed their own in-house Generative A.I. technology (fittingly called Brahma A.I.) to sync up the characters’ lips to the flowery English dialogue. Some are calling it the future of cinema, but in its current incarnation, the result resembles exaggerated mouth movements superimposed on still images for comedy sketches, à la The Annoying Orange.
This effect is befitting of such a robotic adaptation, one which briefly threatens to interrogate the several millennia-old text of the title (in the vein of recent Thai drama The Burning Giants, which critiques the violence at the heart of national myths) before locking itself into a didactic approach. It’s a rigid depiction of both the subcontinent-spanning plot, as well as the theme of “Dharma,” or sacred duty, which the characters verbalize ad nauseum and follow unconditionally, and uninspiringly. For the uninitiated — which is to say, Sony’s target audience for the English dub, whose Indian subtitle (“Part 1”) has been slyly replaced with “Rise of a Legend” to convince people they’re paying for a complete story — the plot concerns an ongoing war between demigods the Devas and demons the Asuras.
The film re-imagines the villainous Ravana as a kind of liberator gone mad. The Asura leader begins by praying for the power to free his enslaved clan, and his island kingdom of Lanka, from Deva oppression before conquering nearby cities through violent conquest with his ambitious siblings by his side.. This forces the demigods to turn to the protector deity Vishnu, who re-incarnates himself as the human-born Rama (Ranbir Kapoor), one of four princes of the kingdom of Ayodhya. Prologues pile up on prologues for nearly an hour, as Rama grows up learning the ways of war and wisdom, since his divine destiny is to defeat the Asuras for good.
However, the filmmakers’ decision to cleave the story in half leaves it hanging in suspended animation. It ends where the central plot of the Ramayana — Rama’s journey to rescuing his devoted wife Sita (Sai Pallavi) from Ravana’s clutches — finally kicks off in earnest, yielding an episodic experience where the central hero and villain are, at best, vaguely aware of one another’s existence. They never actually come into contact, leaving Ramayana: Rise of a Legend with the responsibility of establishing a protagonist and antagonist alluring enough that viewers with no pre-existing religious or cultural attachment will feel dutybound to return in one year’s time — or whenever the sequel is ready.
How does this work out? As far as Ravana is concerned, Kannada-language superstar Yash makes a meal of the character, imagined as an action anti-hero who dances in fiery worship of the destroyer god Shiva, and who nails his enemies with jackknife powerbombs, as vengeful gears turn slowly in his mind. Traditionally depicted with 10 heads side by side, the movie’s version of Ravana re-imagines this as a kind of fissure of personality, wherein 10 different versions of the demon king (some old, some young; some confident, some sniveling) converse and argue within his consciousness. He’s ruthless in one moment, but respectful in the next, making for the closest thing the movie has to complexity before it returns to the story’s binary good-versus-evil traditions. Add to this the fact that the movie’s Lanka is vibrant, energetic and sensual, compared to its stilted, austere Ayodhya, and it becomes hard to root for the ostensible “good guys.”
Unfortunately, this becomes doubly true whenever Rama is on screen. The film’s depiction of him is an utter bore. An embodiment of virtue in the abstract, the heroic prince — who agrees to live in exile for 14 years so one of his brothers can take the throne — is spoken of as a kind and capable figure, but his people’s worship of him is a default setting, rather than something earned through benevolence. After all, Rama is a central figure in Hinduism, so more than enough viewers will bring their own baggage to the movie. But as a story, it’s as rote as can be, a flaw that infects its dramatic DNA: Rama’s relationship to Sita. While Pallavi is afforded a tad more action and autonomy than most actresses in the role, the promise of a sword-wielding Sita is often cut short, returning her quickly to a two-dimensional damsel who shares little chemistry with her husband. Much like Kapoor’s Rama, Pallavi’s Sita is graceful in posture, but there’s little underlying either of them as actual human beings.
Rama, who lacks anything resembling outward opinions or an inner life beyond his Dharma, acquires weapons and knowledge not through practice or learning, but through gurus psychically unlocking these hidden abilities, as though the film were operating on video game logic. Each new chapter sees him “leveling up” as he fights a different, malformed CGI golem in a new forest setting, though at least he deserves credit for using his unlimited magical arrows to get these eyesores off our screens.
Saddled with clunky English dialogue, Kapoor is the perfect actor for this version of Rama, but that’s not the compliment it seems. His po-faced approach snaps perfectly into place, alongside a dramatically dull incarnation of the mythic hero, whose duty toward violent reprisal, and whose adoration by his legions of fans, is a given. Kapoor, a fourth generation Bollywood star, enjoys exactly such a quasi-religious fandom, even if the Hindu nationalist factions the film has been courting with its marketing (which refers to these myths as “history”) has since turned on him for eating meat — a religious faux pas among Hindutva extremists.
Then again, with the movie’s attempts to stoke religious fervor being all but cancelled out, perhaps it makes sense to approach Ramayana: Rise of a Legend as a hermetically sealed experience, if only for a moment. This doesn’t do it any favors either; aesthetically, it’s a headache. While the grandeur of the costumes and archaic sets might draw one’s gaze in static moments, the cumulative effect of its many action scenes is often bewildering. Sure, some individual shots are big and bold in composition, but they’re frenetic and unfocused when strung together, with points of interest shifting in and out, left and right, and up and down at random. The fantasy fights lack the necessary physical and emotional weight to make a lasting impact, even before Rama’s fellow exiled brother Lakshmana (Ravi Dubey) delivers his umpteenth comic quip met by awkward dead air, adding to the Marvel-ness of it all.
Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman join hands for some booming compositions, but the music — much of which has been trimmed for the shorter cut, which features little singing or dancing — is tasked with scoring scenes and set pieces with no rhythm of their own. The film feels entirely off-kilter even before characters open their distracting, digitally-rendered mouths. That some of them sound like whiny, posh South Bombay youngsters is, perhaps, something only viewers who’ve spent time in India might really notice in the English version, but it nonetheless robs the dialogue-heavy drama of its potential grandeur.
There are fleeting pluses to be found throughout the runtime. The movie, for instance, features one moment of evocative suggestion — a harsh cut from a nightmarish vision to an empty throne, denoting the weight of Rama’s regal responsibility — but anything resembling moral dilemma is quickly swallowed by prescriptive plot developments, which leave little room for meaningful character arcs or emotional possibility. A climactic mid-air battle does, quite mercifully, manage to capture the imagination without much haphazard distraction. However, this scene doesn’t actually involve Rama at all. Its focus, instead, is a supporting character barely glimpsed up until that point, leaving Kapoor’s dreary protagonist to promise a more cogent narrative in the sequel.
The duology’s success is all but guaranteed in India and among its diaspora, given how deeply entrenched the Ramayana remains in Hindu and Indian culture (its release coincides with the major festival Diwali). However, to anyone not already attuned to the tale, it’s hard to imagine this version being a meaningful enough introduction to bring novice viewers back. It has neither the emotional hook nor the soul to compensate for its lack of visual momentum, and its reliance on a half-baked tech to appeal to a wider audience impedes what little drama exists at its core.