This review contains spoilers.
The lead pair wears white (mostly). The attackers wear black (always). Heroes are glowing because how else would we have recognised who they are — the title of the film is not enough. The female protagonist, Isha, isn't shown to have any life of her own as she goes to take the articles of the male protagonist, Shiva, as he trains in the mountains. The Himalayas is talked about as the next shopping arcade in Connaught Place and not a mountain range which spans from west to east. I mean it can't be bigger than the film right? In being called a button or pataka, there is humour.
Such is their huge world, that the movie Brahmastra makes me feel stupid.
Even though the story is about astras, which are shown as some kind of objects, the vision of the storytellers was okay with treating humans as objects too (well apart from the big stars of the story - because they will have an arc as well as a voice).
Maybe in
a movie that lacks quality dialogues and pivotal writing, colour is the only way to reach the audience. Brahmastra is a movie that captures evocation through visuals of fire and colours rather than the content of storytelling.
Shots of tall, blue-red glowing skyscrapers, reminded me of Gotham city even though it was Delhi that the scene was set in. In shots taken from the ground looking over idols, this kind of expansiveness appeared to be a devotee without a single thought about awareness. With leaps across balconies, jumping from a height, falling over the balustrade, and huge effigies, I get the point of the movie — It is mega.
Correction: It is shown as mega.
You are free to insert here other synonyms of huge. Just in case you missed how ‘huge’ the film is, it has been synonymised for you, frame after frame. Or just in case we have missed the promotions.
Somehow
this hugeness made me feel stupid.
I am not averse to cinema that makes me feel stupid. But I guess with Brahmastra this was portrayed with a different intensity (because of repetition of the same point). Attackers wore only black colour, a human without any powers (maybe in the next one they will fix this) does not get burnt even though a dramatic fight sequence is raging on with all kinds of powers being used, and the lack of genuine dialogues to any other characters except to the mega stars of the film industry (even here they faltered).
How is it that the human characters leap over the balconies, run across terraces, jump from elevators and not get injured (when they have not done this ever in life)? I don’t understand the concept of how energy works in these stories. Even though I had the same problem with Marvel movies, this movie made me feel more prone to ask these questions — perhaps because it was closer to home and seemed familiar. I don’t understand how the protagonist fights the antagonists, defends another human, attacks the antagonist, and manoeuvres with a gun, all the while driving a car into the hilly regions of the Himalayas where no other vehicle seems to be present. Why aren't people going to Himachal Pradesh? Has the effect of YJHD weaned off? Has climate-change-induced-travel to hills stalled in the Astraverse?
For a director, who had an emotion for places and an eye for songs like Boondon ke moti, it was difficult to register this movie's absence from its previous workings.
Places like the Himalayas, Varanasi, and Delhi have only been used as words to sprinkle them as a setting. Everything is Yellow in Varanasi. Everyone starts wearing white in the Himalayas. When Mohan dies in a skyscraper in his building, the vibrations from all the fighting do not disturb the building at all. How is it that the clash of such powerful energies and the fight sequences taking place, not affecting the frequency of landslides in the Himalayas? Shiva is shown to be channeling his powers near the riverside, honing them in mountains, and leaping across boulders to reach his lover at the end of the film, but a gun can easily kill all of them? How are such Veers able to miss shots?
Even if we go with the argument that such films are just a respite from reality, an escape, I am still feeling miserably stupid. Is it because all of this happened together in one movie? Is it the cumulative effect of not being able to ground these experiences? Is it because even escape needs to be grounded in some reality? If yes, then how much?
In one
scene, Isha comes to collect Shiva’s things (I don’t understand why couldn’t he
go himself) and is attacked. It is shown that she takes a major fall but in the
next scene is conversing with Shiva over the phone, showing that the phone was quite handy as it was
not damaged at all.
Maybe, I am getting caught up with the dream narrative
and the story’s narrative?
This is a
problem with escape. With devices like dreams, there is so much
shiftiness introduced into the narrative, could it be possible that I was not grounded in the actual story
of the film? This is also a loophole that the creators take advantage of because
in some way they play with the audience and depending on what is working for
them, they can easily influence the narrative later on.
In another
shifty moment, a blackout technique was introduced to keep the audience on the
edge of their seats as many visuals of Isha and Guru, were shown as they were being attacked
but with breaks. There was a collective gasp from the audience as they thought
that either Isha or Guru was dead.
Turned out that it was a technique to hold two birds in the bush.
In one scene, a village is taken over in order to make an army. Their goal is to find the hidden location of the Ashram in which Guru lives and to capture the weapon of Brahmastra. But this sequence falls flat on so many levels as it hardly showed the world of Brahmansh – we hardly see the faces of these people who are inducted into the army. For a group of people who hone these weapons in order to protect the world, it beats me why would they be killing their own people? Why are they not concerned about getting these village men out of their trance when they know they are innocent? Where is the empathy then?
A weapon which can destroy the entire universe can be curtailed by fire, but when all this happens, all that energy is burning trees but no one else. As I said, no care has been to explain how a world like this functions. Just mentioning that this group has been around for centuries and the members are hidden is something that could have been done even on a talk show. They could have given us five minutes of some exciting back story instead of the usual manual in such fantasy movies or an exposition which is hardly an exposition.
We hardly catch the glimpse of other characters honing their Astra. The gaze of the camera travels with Shiva and for Shiva; it hardly stops to focus on any of the secondary characters or places. Tenzing only points and never says anything. All the energy of showing is only focused on the mega stars of the film — how Guru wields a glittering sword, how he cuts a tree, how Shiva runs, how he motions his hands when having fire party, it is a gaze only for the stars not even for the story.
I see the awe in between but the feeling of being unable to speak remains. The film's focus has been to evoke an aura through visual effects.
Whatever humour (registered through the chuckle of the crowd) is made possible, at the expense of Isha when children call her Pataka, or when Isha says to Shiva while trying to find the artist on a heritage site's project that they are his killers; to which Shiva replies that they were not his killers. That whole sequence was just a mistake in not taking their Reported Speech class seriously in school. I wish humour could be made of some solid quality moving forward.
Another thing to notice was that no
one was really speaking in this story apart from the rich stars of the film industry. When
they mentioned ‘Five Pandavas’, we were just being asked to develop sympathy for the secondary characters without the camera even once stopping to focus on any of these characters for real. It treated them with a dismissive approach as fifteen minutes out of the movie hall, I neither remembered their names nor their faces.
The dialogues are hardly there. Just like the word 'love storiyan,' there wasn’t much focus given to the words in the film, the content, the tone in which characters interact or even the rhythm in which they talk. There is a fake softness between the dialogues of Isha and Shiva. It is not just significant explanations about 'what is light' that have been poorly written in order to give some cryptic meaning, even everyday words like 'Cheapo' and 'Namaste' have been used in an off-putting way. I wish they had paid their writers well and valued the creative writing industry more.
The film has been promoted to be big and people will watch this film with families. Kids will come out of theatres and carry pop culture references in their classes. The most probable reason that can be used for these inconsistencies is the idea of an alternate universe. But again, I feel stupid encountering this. Am I asking so many questions because I saw a movie in a theatre? Would I have not felt stupid if I watched it at home? Or watched it after having watched a couple of more films in the theatre? Did the experience heighten some of the issues/shifts in the film which otherwise would not have been made accessible to me?
"Ranbir Kapoor keeps swimming across my face," said one person as we boarded the metro.