Kartik Kota

So against my better judgement, I decided to give this a watch on Netflix. Now I had already heard of all the trash dialogues and stuff which created such a controversy. So I had minimum expectations going in. Little was I to know that there is something far below the lowest you can expect! The movie is a VFX disaster! In today’s day and age they looked childish at best. Some of the reviews here saying the VFX are stunning and epic are probably just paid reviewers or very ignorant. Certain scenes in the movie just do not make any head or tail. Prabhas’ introduction scene looks like Harry Potter fighting Dementors but without a Patronus charm! So is the scene of Sita’s abduction. A giant bat is Ravana’s stead? Cinematic freedom clearly abused without any care for what’s written in the manuscripts. Lanka looks more like Mordor than the resplendent Lanka. And the Asuras look like Orcs from the Lord of the Rings trilogy! Ravana feeding meat to the giant bat was simply preposterous if not incendiary! A scene during the final battle made me feel I was watching Harry Potter and Voldemort fight it out. Why even today can’t we come up with our own ideas? There was no sense of story or character building in this movie. I feel the makers of the movie were bereft of ideas and left a lot of details out thinking everyone knows the story of the Ramayana so why should we bother. I wish they had gone one step further and said why bother making the movie! Coming to the actors… Not one of them had any charisma or divinity about them. You simply could not connect to them at any level and I do not understand why the makers decided to call them by different names like Raghav, Janaki, Sesh and Bajrang! I will not even bother to write about the costumes used or the looks given to the actors. Definitely would not want to write about the pedestrian dialogues used for a revered Hindu epic. It is just petty and lazy writing! I finished watching the 2 hours 57 minute movie in less than 90 minutes because I had to forward so many times. I really feel bad for those who watched this in theatres. Bottomline: avoid this movie like the plague or COVID!