Even before Hollywood had come out with their Marvel & DC characters, our Indian culture was rich with stories of gods & men with super powers since centuries. With the advent of movies & emergence of technology, Hollywood marketed their super heroes impressively which took the world by storm as evidenced by the humongous blockbusters & the moolah brought in through sale of merchandise. Over the past decade or so, our film industry has also started taking some credible strides in that genre with movies like the Krrish series & "Minnal Murali". The latest to join that list is Ayan Mukherjee's "Brahmastra" which is the first installment of a trilogy based on the ancient astras. The box-office numbers has been encouraging but it definitely had scope for much more if they were more sensible with their script.
The film unfolds with the story behind the creation of the astras & a secret society called the Brahmansh. This group has been in existence for centuries & their responsibility was to protect the planet from the astras falling into the wrong hands especially Brahmastra which was the most powerful among them. As it was unstable, it was broken into three pieces & safeguarded by the society. In the present day, one of the pieces were in the safe custody of noted scientist, Mohan Bhargav (SRK) & he is forced to fight the dark forces led by Junoon (Mouni Roy). Even as he valiantly fought them, Shiva (Ranbir Kapoor), a DJ by profession gets a vision of this encounter though he had no clue as to why he was experiencing them. There was obviously a link between Shiva & the astras, and his search for answers forms the basis of this fantasy flick.
There is no doubt that Ayan had an interesting subject in hand which he himself had penned & with the financial backing of Dharma Productions among others, it seemed like that he had all the stars aligned. His idea to take on the subject entwined with a romantic tale sounded fine but when portrayed on celluloid it was pathetic to say the least. The cheesy & nonsensical romance (dialogues by Hussain Dalal) was cringy to say the least which was surprising as he did handle it reasonably well in "Yeh Jawaani Hey Diwani". Unfortunately, a significant portion of the run time is focused on this & there are undeniable influences from "X Men", "Harry Potter" etc. which is fine but still they ought to have invested more thought into the script.
On the positive side, the technical aspects such as the VFX was top notch & the DoPs (quite a few of them including Manikandan, Sudeep Chatterjee etc) have done a fantastic job. Pritam's music was ok while Simon Fraglen's BGM was good. Coming to performances, I certainly felt SRK nailed his part (interestingly named after his character in "Swades"), Big B was effective as the guru while Nagarjuna was wasted in a poorly etched role. Ranbir did his part aptly though his romance with Alia was the unbearable part of the movie & the fault lies solely on Ayan for that. Hopefully Alia has a better role in other installments coz I felt she got a raw deal like Nagarjuna. Last but not the least, Mouni Roy cmae across as a villain caricature but she perfectly fitted the role.
Verdict: Mounted at a humongous budget of ~400 C , the movie has collected close to 350C until now. However, based on a statement made by Ranbir in an interview; a significant portion of the budget also includes the the next two installments as well. Despite the evident shortcomings, the story still managed to create expectations for the sequels with characters like Dev & Amrita expected to take centre stage. Anyway hope they will rectify the glaring flaws in their narration, but for now it is still worth a try (provided you prepare yourself for the cringy romance)!!!
Rating: 2/5
Regards...Ben
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