‘Kalki 2898 AD’ Movie Review - When Creativity is Replaced with CGI

The audience standing in the waiting room area before my screening of Kalki 2898 AD was eagerly discussing the amount of money it took to make this movie. With a budget of ₹600 crore, Kalki 2898 AD is the most expensive Indian film. Like those audience members, the filmmakers, too, must have gotten wet dreams thinking about the amount of cash they would be spending on this sci-fi. Because with a budget as massive as this, Kalki 2898 AD became a colossal beast before its official release. And when you look at the opening scenes of this film, you wonder if all that money couldn't have been spent on something genuinely ambitious and deserving. And if spending crores of money on a project is "ambition," then there is no difference between filmmakers and businessmen. But let's go back to those opening moments of Kalki 2898 AD; it's appalling because we get the misfortune of watching an animated Amitabh Bachchan. Tom and Jerry are more expressive than this young Bachchan character. Director Nag Ashwin takes this awful CGI step because he wants the young and old Ashwatthama to have the same facial features (yes, there is an age difference, but the character is still Bachchan). He thinks too logically, which is not a sign of an imaginative mind. A creative filmmaker would have solved this problem by casting a younger actor for these Mahabharata sequences without paying attention to "logic." There is no place for this l-word in the realm of fantasy.

Alas, Ashwin's creativity can only be seen in the expensive images - ragged buildings, giant movable statues, inverted pyramids. So much energy is spent on the vehicles and the gadgets that you can almost feel Ashwin jumping in excitement while deploying his favorite toys on the screen. He is comfortable with machines, which is why the action scenes have a zing. Their choreography isn't very inventive, but the actors add a sense of liveliness to the fights. They, too, like Ashwin, work well with the machines. In fact, Bhairava's (Prabhas) best friend is his car named Bujji (Keerthy Suresh lends her voice to the AI). Bhairava is a bounty hunter whose sole aim is to live inside the Complex - a massive structure in the form of an inverted pyramid that shelters all the rich people of the society. Sure, Prabhas gets his share of rousing scenes, yet the best hero moment in Kalki 2898 AD belongs to Anna Ben's Kyra, who flies off on her vehicle after assuring Sumathi (Deepika Padukone). The word "cool" was probably coined for moments like these. Anna Ben is sparkling, and when she exits, you feel as if a portion of the film's heart has been sliced. Padukone gets a role that she could do in her sleep. Her Sumathi is elevated by the softness and fragility the actor brings with her on the screen. Sumathi, due to Padukone's presence, displays the kind of purity and innocence one usually associates with a mother. Even without that pregnant belly, if people had called her "Ma," you wouldn't have been surprised.

Kalki 2898 AD is filled with actors who deserve a better movie than the one that asks them to simply pose in front of the green screen. It's sad to see such a huge waste of talent, though it's also true that without this cast, this computer-generated structure would have crumbled. Saswata Chatterjee livens up a bland role with a comic sting. Look at him saying he will return later when a scientist tells him he wasn't expecting him. That scientist works for Supreme Yaskin (Kamal Haasan). His job is to extract life-extending serum from pregnant ladies for the proclaimed god of the Complex, who, with old, flabby skin and chakra-like circles around him, looks like a deformed ascetic. If you want to meet him, you have to stand on the palms of a giant golden statue that puts you on the steps of a box-like structure like a devotee offering flowers to his deity. The filmmakers have used their brains to create such complex mechanisms, which is also evident in their design of that machine, which extracts the serum and then throws the pregnant ladies into a fiery pit. The screenplay, by Ashwin and Rutham Samar, doesn't make it clear if (or why) the women living in the Complex are spared from the serum-extraction experiment. Could any of those wealthy women we see dancing at a party that Bhairava gatecrashes could give Yaskin his serum? Or does entry into the Complex automatically make you immune to painful experiments? What would have happened if, instead of Sumathi, some other girl in the Complex had become pregnant with Kalki?

Ashwin and his team have spent so much energy on CGI that they have ignored the execution of dialogue scenes. Simple conversations (they are mostly clunky expositions) sound awkward, maybe due to the Hindi dubbing. Is it because of the lousy dubbing that the lines either sound too pompous or juvenile? The issue is further exacerbated by the background score that pushes every emotion toward you aggressively. Since the filmmakers have spent so much money, they don't risk leaving things ambiguous for the audience. They overload our senses and accentuate everything. For all its "grand beauty," Kalki 2898 AD is infected with terrible filmmaking. Scenes are ended with a full stop - they do not segue. The mood, as well as the music, is instantly changed when we move from one scene to the next scene. As far as the Bhairava-Ashwatthama face-off is concerned, it merely keeps proving to us how powerful these two characters are, which is something you understand early and very quickly. Thus, this clash resembles nothing more than a suspenseless violent pageantry.

Kalki 2898 AD shines sporadically. Bhairava's backstory has a sharp emotional layer to it (whether it's true or not is another different story). When Vasudeva, with Krishna in his arms, arrived at the Yamuna river, the water parted. Something similar, albeit with fire, occurs in Kalki 2898 AD. Other moments, such as Ashwatthama vs Bujji and that reveal, excited the audience during my screening, and the movie, overall, might end up satisfying those people who want a Marvel-like template in their films. With so many cinematic universes developing in the Indian film industry, we, too, seem to be adopting the Marvel formula of cinematic delight, where cameos and CGI inventions replace potent stories and daring filmmaking. Make no mistake, Indian mythology is being used as a factory to produce mundane products that substitute risky ideas with safe banalities. The cinematic universes will be filled with cameos and crossovers - not creativity.

Final Score- [4.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times