Tik Tik Tik

Shakti Soundar Rajan seems to be influenced by Hollywood movies a lot and after a hugely disappointing Miruthan, a zombie thriller, he has come up with another genre familiar to Holly wood, space thriller titled Tik Tik Tik. We were all blown away by the visual quality of the movie’s trailer which made most of us look forward to the movie. But barring the few moments of quality visual effects, there is hardly any freshness or genuineness to this Jayam Ravi starrer.

Spoiler Alert! Skip the paragraph if you were so excited to know the uniqueness of the content of this film. So a meteor hits earth and this time it’s not New York, but Chennai. But the alarming fact was that a bigger one which can change the existing map of India is arriving soon. So the defense department calls for a meeting and the decision to split the meteor so that it won’t hit the earth was taken. But the tough part was that only China (muted by censors) has the nuclear missile of that scale which can break the asteroid. So to get that our team needed expert thieves/criminals. How this whole operation of getting the missile and destroying the asteroid happens is what Tik Tik Tik dealing with.

Take a lot from Armageddon, add a good amount of Now You See Me and a few pinches of Interstellar and Gravity along with directors creative addition is what you need to prepare the script of Tik Tik Tik. Getting inspired by an idea or being ambitious is not a bad thing to do. But making it look really shallow and way too ridiculous is something I personally can’t tolerate. There is a blackmailing angle in this script by Shakti Soundar Rajan and I must say that it really feels weird when you look at the whole picture. It almost feels like Shakti Soundar Rajan didn’t know how to conclude this space saga, so he planted a typical revenge drama kind of thing inside a disaster management based film. I am not making this up, at one point an Indian spaceship loses control and lands on the moon and our hero becomes the first Indian to land on the moon. I hope ISRO won’t file any defamation case.

Miruthan was an audacious ambitious debacle that just had an advantage of being the first of its kind in Tamil. This time also director has chosen an idea that he can market as a first of its kind, not just in Tamil Nadu, but also in India. Yes, the second half of the entire movie is set in the space and perhaps for an industry insider, the fact that they have managed to come up with this much of visual quality is a promising thing when you look at the future. But ultimately cinema is about how good the content is and mere visual spectacle isn’t enough. Like I already said, Shakti lifts plot elements from every famous English film (mention the ones which I couldn’t recognize). His creative addition is the blackmailing part and also the fight between the India and China on a space station. Many a time that phase became an unintentional comedy due to the way it tries to add masala to the content. In the beginning areas, Shakti is showing us the skill of his protagonists so that he can reuse them afterward to establish how they did it. But in both cases, you might end up feeling they pushed it a bit too much. Technically the film looks good. The visuals inside and outside the spacecraft have a level of authenticity which when compared to the overall quality of our films in the visual effects department is good. The D Imman music and score isn’t doing anything particularly good for the film. The production design of the film is solid.

Jayam Ravi plays the character of Vasu in his typical style. There is a lack of clarity in the director’s mind on how to present him. His intro makes him almost a magneto level super criminal who needs to be kept under highly secure locations and in the next moment, he almost acts like a mere pickpocket. Singapore actor Aaron Aziz was a good choice in widening the market. Nivetha Pethuraj gets a one-dimensional character. The characters given to Ramesh Thilak and Arjunan goes on to prove that even if it is a disaster thriller, Tamil cinema will still have hero’s friend going along with him, even to the moon. Jayaprakash and Vincent Asokan were okay in their respective roles.

There are numerous negatives to the content of this film. But where it manages to make you less uncomfortable about those facts is in its making, in the sheer technical sense. There is an ongoing debate on whether this director becoming the writer thing is good or not. In my opinion, this movie is a testament to the argument that goes in favor of having a separate writer.

Rating: 2.5/5