ADIPURUSH Review: Catastrophic VFX Mar Bahubali-Style Indian Epic

The epidemic of terrible CGI afflicting Hollywood reaches Indian shores with fantasy action blockbuster Adipurush ("First Man"), releasing day and date around the globe.

 

Andy Muschietti, director of the concurrently releasing The Flash, when questioned about the subpar VFX in his film, offered the fig leaf of “we make it look that way on purpose.” While audiences reject that defense for a film reportedly budgeted at $220 million, they might be equally unforgiving for a film that cost merely $85 million in comparison; in local currency terms at 700 crores, Adipurush is the most expensive Indian film ever made.

 

Adipurush is based on the Ramayana, one of the two great Indian epics, and essentially the bedrock of all Indian, at least Hindu, culture. You might think that a film based on what is essentially scripture might be the equivalent of a faith-based film in the United States, like the recent indie hit The Chosen. While "Christian" films are extremely niche in the United States, playing to a very specific audience, Adipurush, by comparison, is supposed to be a four-quadrant mega-blockbuster locally, the equivalent of a Marvel film.

 

That might seem strange at first; you’d hardly expect a Bible adaptation to be a country-wide hit (The Passion of the Christ excepted). Therein lies the dichotomy of the great Indian epics.

 

The Ramayana & Mahabharata are not just the Bible of India, but also the Iliad & Odyssey. While Iliad & Odyssey are epics of a dead pagan religion, Hinduism is very much alive and practiced by a majority of Indians. So Adipurush offers the spectacle of seeing gods on screen, that a majority of Indians pray before in temples daily, as superheroes with bulging muscles, cool moves, and a banging singing voice.

 

Is Hollywood missing a beat by not making a fantasy epic with a badass, shredded Jesus visiting violent vengeance upon the forces of darkness? We are afraid such a film would be laughed off the screen, and Americans would only tolerate such a portrayal as a parody on Saturday Night Live.

 

Adipurush mercifully has an extremely simple storyline, as any action film should. Raghav (Prabhas) is an Indian prince in exile, living in forests as a nomad accompanied by his wife Janaki (Kriti Sanon) and brother Shesh (Sunny Singh). Uber-baddy Lankesh (Saif Ali Khan) kidnaps Janaki and takes her to his island fortress of Lanka. Raghav and Shesh team up with super-powered monkey god Bajrang (Devdatta Nage) and an army of monkeys to attack Lanka, defeat Lankesh, and get Janaki back.

 

This narrative is actually just the middle third of the epic poem. The first third of the Ramayana contains the elaborate backstory of how Raghav ended up in exile. The filmmakers, in a rare good decision, jettison the entire lengthy set-up to directly start with the conflict between Raghav and Lankesh.

 

The opening credits contain a severely truncated version of the backstory but the filmmakers are clearly relying on the fact that every Indian -- since birth, more or less -- is intimately familiar with the details of the Ramayana. Western audiences might feel unmoored in the beginning, though the stakes are easy enough to comprehend with this archetypical story.

 

It should be noted that the gods that are worshipped in the temples of India go by Ram, Sita, and Laxman rather than Raghav, Janaki, and Shesh; presumably the names were altered to inoculate the film from religious criticism. For the same purpose, the version playing in Indian theaters also includes a lengthy disclaimer that takes pains to state that Adipurush is a work of fiction and no disparagement of the Hindu religion is intended.

 

This is to avoid the risk of an adverse reaction from the largely Hindu population or governmental censorship, since freedom of speech protections are not as strong. North American audiences are spared this disclaimer because no such risks exist.

 

A major failing of the film is that despite the primitively simple story structure, Adipurush stretches to a patience-testing three hours. The runtime is more a function of what the filmmakers think the audience expects from an “epic” action blockbuster rather than the needs of the plot. In fact, all the tropes of populist mainstream Indian fare are in full force: shirtless action introduction scene for the hero, gratuitous slow-motion galore, non sequitur song interludes, marginalization of women to bit parts, dear-air padding built in after dialog, and action scenes to accommodate the audience’s hooting and hollering.

 

For a fantasy action film, there are several protracted sequences of combat, though only one – the first attack on the island fortress of Lanka – is mildly diverting. The rest are drowned out by an avalanche of terrible VFX, that turn the screen into a swirl of gyrating greyish, blurry pixels for much of the film.

 

Audiences who loved S. S. Rajamouli’s breakout hit RRR might think that kooky VFX are a feature, not a bug of Indian cinema. But that undersells just how shocking the CGI in Adipurush is. There are scenes in the film that would be considered unreleasable on a cheap network show in the US, let alone a major summer blockbuster. There is a crisis of VFX quality in films around the world and releasing such a product to the public is a setback for the industry. It will further undermine the faith audiences have in blockbusters today to deliver quality visuals.

 

Even at a design level, several issues plague the film. For an Indian film based on the greatest Indian epic, it is stunning how un-Indian the film looks.

 

The design of Lanka is lifted from Minas Morgul and Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. The anthropomorphic animals, monkeys, and their kingdoms look much like what you’ve seen in King Kong, the Planet of the Apes series, The Jungle Book, and The Lion King. Sequences with Lankesh’s flying steed are clearly based on similar scenes in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon.

 

Some of Lankesh’s demons look like Dementors and Death Eaters from Harry Potter. Entire battle sequences are cribbed from Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth movies, including The Hobbit series, down to armies of orcs and trolls. Lankesh’s son has a superspeed superpower and his sequences mimic DC’s Flash and Marvel’s Quicksilver from the X-Men series. When the heroes stand in a circular formation before the battle, the camera circles around them in a move straight out of The Avengers. And on and on it goes.

 

Rajamouli’s Baahubali was ahistorical but at least imagined a distinctly Indian fantasia. Adipurush is content to pilfer other IP without adding anything original of its own. Western audiences looking to experience an original Indian blockbuster will instead be confronted with a cheap, Z-grade facsimile of better Hollywood films.

 

The writing isn’t much better. The strangeness of the dialog will be lost on non-Hindi speakers that watch the film with subtitles. Much of the dialog is delivered in an archaic Sanskrit-inflected version of Hindi, clearly meant to sound period and lofty, as if worthy of demigods, only to be interspersed with colloquial modern-day “hood lingo” for a jarring effect. It’s the equivalent of Jesus telling Judas “I’m going to set your sorry little bitch ass on fire”, which is essentially what Bajrang tells a Lankesh henchman.

 

The actors do not manage to elevate the material either. Adipurush was made in Hindi and Telugu simultaneously and has a cast assembled from both the film industries. In a remarkable acknowledgment of the Southern film industry’s vanquishment of Bollywood at the box office, it is the Telugu star who is the hero and the Bollywood star who is the villain, whereas 20 years ago it would have been the opposite.

 

Prabhas achieved international stardom after Baahubali but is a charisma blackhole in the lead role of Adipurush. Maybe it is the language barrier, though his voice in Hindi was dubbed anyway. He’s stone-faced throughout and isn’t helped by an unflattering costume that leaves him a flat, diminished figure for most of the film.

 

Saif Ali Khan goes full ham as the mustache-twirling Lankesh. His elevated stature of 10 feet adds mighty little and seems ripped off from 300’s villain Xerxes. Kriti Sanon as Janaki is the damsel in distress and irritatingly refers to herself in the third person in the few lines she is afforded. Devdatta Nage is fine as the monkey-god Bajrang, though it is head-scratching as to why he is singularly turned into a humanoid monkey via face make-up whereas all the other monkeys are straight-up actual monkeys rendered with motion-captured CGI.

 

Mainstream Indian cinema seems to be having somewhat of a breakout moment in the West, though there is a pervasive feeling of it being an exotic and lurid guilty pleasure. Populist Indian fare seems likelier to generate patronizing snickers rather than heartfelt admiration and Adipurush isn’t about to reverse that course.