Baahubali

In a recent interview, director Rajamouli said that the movie Baahubali’s script was very small. Well for a movie that focuses simply on set pieces, small script would have been okay but it should have had something that will leave us in excitement in terms of visual representation. Many years of making, lots of hype about the visual effects and production design, and what we got is honestly an average cinema with really poor quality visual effects.

Shiva is this young guy who is brought up by his mother who got him from the river when he was a baby. He always wanted to go up the huge waterfalls which was there in his village. After many attempts over many years, he succeeds in doing that and the movie’s “epic” plot gets revealed when he meets some people in the newly discovered world.

Two instances that I would consider in the movie as catchy are the interval scene (where Rajamouli smartly includes an imaginary statue) and the scene were Baahubali inspires his soldiers to fight for glory. The thing we call as mass appeal was there in both scenes. Except for that, there is no real amazing or breath taking stuff in this Rajamouli version of Mahabharath. I am calling it as a Rajamouli version because there is this quintessential Rajamouli flavor in it; rebirth or reincarnation (which we have seen in films like Eega and Maghadheera). Kaurava’s and Pandava’s are replaced by single characters who play the lead antagonist and protagonist respectively. Character’s similar to Shakuni and Bheeshma are also there in the movie. No real surprise is there in the story as we will be able to predict most of the things that will happen in this 158 minutes of visual story telling.

As a visually rich story teller, Rajamouli has tried to make things engaging. Every attempt is to show us some heroics that kind of epitomizes our hero Shiva or Baahubali. But the only thing that would have helped him in succeeding in this was the visual effects and I have to say that it looked tacky. Except for some large canvas shots like a few in the first Prabhas-Tamannaah song, the visual effects looked boring on screen. The dynamics and rendering quality wasn’t good and these awkward slow motions, especially in the war sequence only makes thing look very shoddy. I don’t intend to insult the efforts of the team who worked on these, but glorifying this visual effects will never help the Indian cinema in achieving new heights in terms of quality. The screenplay is very predictable and there are no layers in this story telling. Dialogues are just about okay and Rajamouli also seems to be unwilling in breaking certain clichés (the way the people speak in those times). Cinematography wasn’t that great with most frames being shot too closely. The BGMs and music were nice from M M Keeravani. Art direction from veteran Sabu Cyril also showed quality.

More than the expressions, Prabhas’s bulky look does the job here. Rana surprised me with his powerful portrayal as the antagonist Bhalla aka Palvaalthevan. Tamannaah was a disappointing casting. Sathyaraj and Remya Krishnan did justice to their roles. I hope Anushka would have a better role in the second part. Nassar also performed nicely as this wicked character.

So to sum it up, I wasn’t that impressed by this so called epic film from director S S Rajamouli. Baahubali seriously lacks creativity and emotional depth. Visual effects, the only tool that would have saved the movie not showing quality, it becomes just an average cinema. The rating for Baahubali – The Beginning is 2.5/5. If you haven’t seen any movie with large scale visual effects, go for this one and get surprised.