Adipurush Teaser: Hope the teaser is just teasing us, and the film will be a lot more classy

What on earth is this creature that crawls into our line of vision? Is it a bird or a plane? No. It’s the Ramayana, according to director Om Raut.

The long-awaited first teaser of Om Raut’s Adipurush was released on 2nd October. Other than Saif Ali Khan’s outstanding screen presence, it left me with mixed feelings, very mixed feelings. The kind that I felt when I saw the first teaser of Samrat Prithviraj.

Do I really want to see Prabhas as Ram, specially when his godly avatar looks somewhat sharply photoshopped. A little nip here and a cut there is okay. But this Ram avatar looks like it has been through a blow dryer. I know Gods are otherworldly in the truest sense. But this is beyond the other world.

Also Prabhas’ voice seems to be dubbed, in the teaser at least, by Sharad Kelkar (the director Om Raut’s Tanhaji connection). I hope Prabhas dubs his own lines in the actual film. Or else, we all know what they say about performances being dubbed extraneously: it becomes two different performances, visually and aurally.

On the other hand, Ram speaking with a Tamilan accent in Hindi would be too much of culture shock for the bhakts.

The teaser, though well cut, left me confused. Hanuman, played by Devdatta Nage, lands from the sky feet first and hands positioned like a Shaolin martial artiste. I guess that’s fine. A bit of anachronistic elegance never hurt a film. Kriti Sanon as Sita is seen swinging happily on a jhoola. She looks… tall. I don’t know how tall the real Sita was. But I don’t think Ram would have liked his better-half to be taller than him.

The teaser’s biggest letdown are the special effects. The ten heads of Raavan look like Saif’s image blurred by a photographer who’s had too much drink. The vanar sena (monkey army) looks like an animation of The Planet Of The Apes, and very clumsy animation too. There is a shot of Raavan Saif Ali Khan flying on an electronic bird. It is a visual straight out of an amusement park, where daddy must sit on a dummy bird pretending to be on a high adventure for his little one’s sake.

In fact, the teaser of Adipurush, unveiled at huge event in Ayodhya, is very worrying. The special effects are downright tacky and the computer graphics seem to be done on a personal computer.

There is a solid muddle mystery here: Where did the estimated 250 crores spent on special effects go? The overall budget of the film is said to be around 500 crores,. In that case, why is this ostensibly lavish adaptation of the Ramayana looking like the mythological of yore, featuring Mahipal and Anita Guha?

I do hope the teaser is just teasing us, that the film itself would be a lot more classy and a lot less tawdry. Adipurush looks outrageously compromised, as though the Gods have compromised against the project. Only divine intervention can rescue this mythological conundrum.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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