Vimaanam

Vimaanam is what you get when you try to dilute a nice and simple real life story into an extremely melodramatic unreal love story. With dialogues that have sickening amount of melodrama taking away the charm, this predictable story is neither inspiring nor moving on any level. The only thing I found as an appreciable thing was the quality of production values.

Venkittaraman aka Venkidi is this man who had this dream of making an airplane of his own. People always called him mad for having this dream which all considered as a ridiculous one except his girlfriend, uncle and his mentor. The movie talks about Venkidi’s efforts to create the aircraft and also how his dream of flying it with his girlfriend came true.

Like I already said, the writing is the major weak point here. The screenplay is failing to surprise us with what it shows us on screen. What were even more disappointing were the slightly cheesy and always melodramatic dialogues. Towards the last part of the film we have our hero making landings in proper airport and some more ambitious stuff which was way too much in my opinion.

Prithviraj is known to have this dramatic style and that style of acting wasn’t helping him here. His dialogue delivery had that artificiality which wasn’t there in the dialogue delivery of the character Janaki (good work by the dubbing artist). It was that weird scenario of seeing veterans speak artificially while the new comers were reducing the unreal tone (Even Anarkali Marikkar was good in terms of dialogue delivery). Durga Krishna looks promising. Alencier Lopez and Sudheer Karamana are struggling in handling the dramatic dialogues. Saiju Kurup and Ashokan get caricature like characters.

Aby and Vimanam had a legal tussle as they were both based on the life of Saji Thomas. As someone who has now seen both these films I feel Aby was much better than Vimaanam because it focused on the flying thing. Pradeep M Nair’s version of the story is more on the love angle of it and this outdated formula of making it grand every time, makes it look so unreal. A lot of practicality issues are not addressed in Vimaanam. I don’t wish to repeat the melodrama term anymore. The cheesiness into which the film goes into makes it even more underwhelming. The makeup artist might have had a tough time. I don’t wish to disrespect their effort, but it wasn’t working. Music was fine. The production design and the visual effects work were also pretty good.

The decision of the makers to focus on the love story part instead of the real challenge of making an airplane limits Vimaanam considerably and thus becoming an underwhelming experience on the whole. This will be the least impressive Malayalam film produced by Listin Stephen.

Rating: 2/5