By the time Adipurush’s first landmark battle comes around, the film has dragged itself through the mulch of abstract imagery and dull dialogue to the point that not even adrenaline-pumping action sequences can summon anything akin to energy. “Ye toh phisaddi hai,” Shesh (Laxman) remarks while overlooking a battle-to-the-last-breath between Sugreev and Bali. It’s an oddly placed comment, delivered within the loose geometry of a scene that neither feels earnest nor significant. There is a strange form of stiffness on display throughout the film, as Om Raut weaves an age-old story with little imagination and even lesser verve. Years in the making, much hyped and anticipated, this is a film that fails to not only reimagine the Ramayana but inadvertently places Ramanand Sagar’s TV adaptation, which came out more than three decades ago, above itself.
Prabhas plays Raghav (Ram), the exiled king of Ayodhya, living in the wild with his brother Shesh (Sunny Singh) and wife Janaki (Kriti Sanon as Sita). The film starts running from the off, barely pausing to contextualise. So comatose is the first half of the film that for the first 45 minutes you have to wonder if anyone has spoken anything of meaning. Lankesh (Raavan), played by the dependable Saif Ali Khan, is the only one trying to heave the sluggish narrative into a plane of existence where it at least echoes chaos, if not life. His well-gelled hairstyle, a giant-sized body and kohl-filled eyes are indicative of the limited imagination on the creators’ part but it is still the only bit of edge that the film is willing to support.
Of all the performances on display, strangely, it is Prabhas who underwhelms the most. His eloquence borders on lethargy, for he stares into the distance without conviction. Sunny Singh protrudes out of a lifeless canvas like an inanimate nail that simply doesn’t add anything to the woodenness of the tapestry. He moves, speaks and expresses without the hint of a soul. Furthermore, none of the epic’s moral conundrums are ever queried, undermining a text that serves not just as a monolith of religiosity in this country but is also one of its greatest literary possessions. Tellingly, this complicated yarn yields a rather simple iteration of a by-the-numbers story that aspires to say and ask nothing of original import.
The awful VFX behind Adipurush long before the film was pulled from the theatres — in a first? — following public outrage, but it is hard to identify what has improved, if anything, since. Much of the world-building is low on detail and high on indistinguishable, pixelated swatches of colour. The music supplies some sense of grandeur but it struggles to support performances that leave you dumbfounded for their utter lack of urgency. Then there is the dialogue, the vexing use of a language that doesn’t fit the mould of a story most consider synonymous with grace and elegance. “Marega bete,” a resident guard tells Bajrang (Hanuman) before a fight ensues between the two. “Jalegi tere baap ki,” Bajrang declares in another scene soon after. Even to the most liberal of audiences, it’s the kind of contemporising that this text could have done without.
It’s clear that the creative team behind Raut’s film signed up for something they could neither fully fathom nor be brave enough to scour the depths of. Raghav’s relationship with Shesh feels like a tepid association built on the cornerstone of formality rather than emotion. Sure there is a sense of untouchability about this half of the story, and yet the film offends by not even attempting to supplant a kind of humanity to most of its relationships. A lot of the film’s visual choices echo Western influences, which only adds to the late gloss of Ramanand Sagar’s TV original that, though mounted on a meagre scale, could at least lay claim to a language of its own making.
There is obviously a lot that is wrong, probably even problematic with Adipurush. Even if you look past the subpar VFX, the larger canvas of the film plateaus into an agreeable, but ultimately uninspiring retelling of an epic that probably could use a modern retelling. Not through the arrogance of pre-pubescent dialogue, however, but through the faculty of curiosity and the kind of tools that modernity has provisioned filmmakers with. Adipurush, on the other hand, is storytelling done with numbingly little innovation and a chockfull of blind alleys to boast of. Only Saif, and to an extent, Sannon make it out of the film with their reputations intact while Prabhas, unlike his sinewy turn in Baahubali, surrenders under the weight of something more elegant. But, then, in the hands of a writing this daft, an imagination this dull, nobody stood a chance.
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