After seeing Bahubali, Baji Rao Mastani, and RRR, watching Adipurush was a punishment. The South Indian movie industry has shown us a big shift; they excelled on every level. They have good technicians and skilled people. But in Bollywood, it has always been glory, fantasy, fashion, fiction, and heroism. There are hardly any good movies with mind-blowing VFX (apart from people like Sanjay Leela Bhansali) in filmmaking. Either they’re taking people for granted or don’t even realize what they’re doing. The Ramayana is beloved by Hindus because of the lessons and values it imparts on good versus evil and the importance of doing your duty, yet from the teaser, it doesn’t seem that these lessons will be shown. Rather, it will be another empty action spectacle designed to bilk money from unsuspecting moviegoers.
Adipurush is the latest rehearsal of the Ramayana. The problems that have come to your feet are various. The film has many flaws, such as Raavan looking like a Mughal invader. In the Ramayana, there is a clear description of how he looked, and that is how he has been portrayed down through the ages. Hanuman and his vanar sena look like rejects from Planet of the Apes. However, the biggest gripe that people are having is about the VFX. They had a budget of Rs. 500 crore, and this is what they came up with? Animation in the name of CGI Even Ra.One and Brahmastra (which was a stride for Indian VFX but still not up to Hollywood standards) were better than this movie. Even Ravana’s heads look like Snapchat filters applied to Saif Ali Khan gone crazy.
Raavan is a complex character. On the one hand, he was a scholar well versed in scripture and a devotee of Shiva. On the other hand, his character flaws, such as his egotism and his obsession with Sita, made him evil and led to his disgrace. In the teaser, Raavan is shown as a one-dimensional brute, a portrayal at odds with his scholarly and meditative nature.
Ram’s physique is clearly unimpressive, with CGI used to give him fake abs and tone up his other body parts. Prabhas is more than capable of flaunting an impressive physique; then why give him fake abs? Even the Ram from the 1987 serial was not digitally buffed up, yet he made an impact on viewers.
Lord Rama lives in Hindu hearts, and the Ramayana is one of the great epics that we all follow, believe in, and live by as Hindus. When they are pictured, the filmmakers need to be clearer because they are interpreting it for the world. Already, Hindu gods and goddesses are mocked. We are adding misinterpretation to their narration of our deities. Adipurush is one such horrible representation that one should actually ban.
When you announce that the movie is about Lord Ram and Ramayan, you have to stick to the basics and not work against them. Nobody has a problem if ‘Adipurush’ is a fictional movie based on historical events, but the characters should be fictional too. You can’t show some mythical figure that is against the famous narration and claim it as – This is Lord Ram or Ravan. That’s simply unacceptable.
Ravan is the king of Lanka; he had warriors to fight for him, not apes. And this is the first time I’ve seen a king without a crown. Isn’t the crown a basic identity for a Lankan King? I mean, kings wear crowns even during battle, and that’s an identity that distinguishes them from the rest of the crowd on the battlefield.
Just show Ramayan as Ramayan. What’s the complexity? This is actor NTR in Telugu movies portraying Lord Ram. To date, calendar publishers have printed his picture as Lord Ram in South India. That’s the respect the movie industry had for Hindu devotional characters. Adipurush is trying to follow Hollywood filmmaking – “Take a script from History, change the narration to suit current political trend.”
My problem with Bollywood-style artistic choices in movies in general is that they have that fantasy of exaggerating everything. Which in turn ruins the true essence of a story, the characters, and the environment involved in that. Pick any movie you want, and you will find a rare, never-ending “colorful gloss,” like a mandatory thing. However, there are some Indian movies that I would not put in the “glossy” category. Especially the tiger scene of RRR. It was photo-realistic, and another one would be thumbed because it didn’t attempt to look flashy. The makers tried to make things as realistic as possible.
There’s only one possibility for Adipurush. It’ll become the biggest disaster of all time in the history of Indian cinema. There’s no second possibility at all. Even the die-hard Prabhas fans would agree with me. Made on a massive budget of around 500 crore, it requires a grand opening to start things off. Let’s assume it gets around 150 crore worldwide. The movie won’t collect much after it, given that the characters in the story are cartoonish. Many other answers have described how some of the visuals are copied from other English movies like Game of Thrones and others. It has already ensured that the expectations of most of the audience are met.
Back in 2020, when the announcement of the movie was made, I was genuinely interested in how the movie would be made. But the teaser has ensured that I needn’t waste my money on watching the movie. I guess the teaser would’ve had a similar impact on many other viewers. Prabhas looks like a caricature of himself and less like Prabhu Shri Ram. His entire physique is computer-generated and looks extremely fake. His face, moustache, expressions, etc. bring Duryodhana to mind. Other characters are also shown wearing leather like medieval Europeans. Barely a glimpse of Bhagwa.
The CGI of Adipurush is horrible, to say the least. It makes one wonder if the team deliberately wanted people to feel unimpressed or underwhelmed. Om Raut had a 500 crore budget, but he seems to have given the job of VFX artist to the top student at White Hat Junior. It is supposed to be a blended animation, but the overall effect is such that you feel like you are watching two different movies—an animated movie and a normal one.
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