Brahmastra movie review: Pretty people, flashy but repetitive SFX, boring – oh so boring – mumbo jumbo

Language: Hindi

A great superhero film needs two basic components: first, visual wizardry that goes beyond merely being eye-catching and is also about great ideas (such as Superman freezing a lake with his breath and transporting it to a raging inferno where he puts out the fire simply by letting the lake melt over it); second, emotional resonance.

The new Hindi film Brahmastra: Part One – Shiva hits the bull’s eye with 0.5 out of 2 of these elements. On the optical front, it is grand but it lacks great ideas. It also lacks depth of feeling.

Long before American cinema conjured up humans with superpowers on screen, ancient Indian mythology was replete with fantastical sagas far outmatching anything Hollywood has ever spun from its imagination. Hanuman comes to mind immediately in this context, especially the story of his flight from the Himalayas to Lanka with an entire mountain in the palm of his hand so as to get the healing, life-saving Sanjeevani herb over to the place where Lakshman lay dying. This is just one among a zillion tales that Ayan Mukerji could have mined for Brahmastra. Instead, the writer-director has picked figures from the Indian Hindu mytho-verse, added nuts and bolts from Harry Potter’s world, packaged them with accoutrements akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and DC Comics, with snatches of Sanskrit thrown in.

That’s fair enough. There’s no rule saying we must confine ourselves to borrowing from domestic cinema and literature, and all would have been well if Brahmastra had taken these ingredients further and achieved something special while cooking them together. It does not.

Brahmastra’s protagonist is a DJ called Shiva (Ranbir Kapoor) who harbours a secret. Shiva is an orphan. He has a relationship with fire that he cannot understand – it does not burn him. He meets Isha (Alia Bhatt). They fall in love. The two embark on a journey to find out what’s behind the visions Shiva has been seeing.

In a parallel thread, a triumvirate of modern-day sages fights to prevent the union of the broken parts of a divine weapon with such potency that its misuse could be disastrous for humanity. Shah Rukh Khan, Nagarjuna Akkineni and Amitabh Bachchan play this trio.

Each of the positive characters in this film has a signature strength or astra (weapon) drawn from nature (water, fire, air and so on) or from an entity in Hindu traditions (for example, Hanuman and the Nandi Bull).

There is enough here for creative persons to play with, but the team of Brahmastra – produced, among others, by Karan Johar and Ranbir himself – appears to have gotten satisfied early on with the very notion of an Indian superhero, their budget for technical effects and the megawattage of the cast.

The film’s opening minutes brim over with vitality as a charismatic SRK (playing a scientist called Mohan Bhargava, in a clever allusion to his character from Swades) battles the agents of the chief villain of the cosmos, followed by a lively song and dance introducing Shiva to the audience. The energy dips almost immediately during a prolonged, decidedly dull face-to-face encounter between Shiva and Isha. It picks up only a couple of times thereafter in this 2 hours and 40+ minutes long film.

Considering that Ayan Mukerji gave us Wake Up Sid and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, it is surprising that the writing of the romance between Brahmastra’s leads is stone cold. They’re in love within a snap of the fingers and a blink of an eye – not just attracted to each other but so deeply committed that she blithely follows him around the country, and both risk their lives for each other. When they make repeated declarations of their mutual sentiments, it feels terribly unconvincing. Ranbir has more chemistry with Guru played by the Big B who arrives in the second half, no doubt because Alia’s Isha is far more thinly characterised than Guru.

In the absence of relatable human equations, all the talk about astra and doom in Brahmastra sounds like mumbo jumbo, which gets extremely boring after a while. Even pompous, because everything is made to sound grand and glorious.

Worse though is the use of the effects in the film. The mythical images are, at first, awe-inspiring. Gradually though, their impact wears thin under the weight of repetitiveness and over-elongation. Case in point: once Shiva starts honing his skills with fire, we see him experiment with fireballs in his hands and blazes streaming off his palms. Then we are shown those fireballs and fire streamers again. And then again. And then…it stops being interesting.

Brahmastra is also a reminder that Bollywood needs to re-examine certain formulae before implementing them in 3D. Artistes thrusting their hips at each other and at the screen is a dance move oft-visited by Hindi film choreographers, but in the opening song in Brahmastra when the hero does that standard step, it is startling – and not in a nice way – for a few seconds, because it is in 3D.

There is some suspense to be enjoyed in a car chase involving Shiva and Isha in the mountains. The only other time Brahmastra perks up is during the song Om Deva Deva in the second half. Pritam’s addictive tune, the musical arrangements, the picturisation and Ranbir’s immersive, trance-like acting in that portion are electrifying.

Ranbir and Alia look lovely throughout but are unable to rise above the weak script. The writing does an injustice to Alia in particular.

SRK is the most striking of the sages. His part is very clearly designed and positioned as a cameo. Of the three, Nagarjuna’s role is the most poorly written, and it is hard to understand why a star of his stature signed up for it. Amitabh’s Guru is a full-fledged supporting role. The veteran star’s screen presence does a lot to elevate his scenes, but there are several places where I struggled to decipher his dialogues.

Mouni Roy allows her character Junoon to consume her, and is the only actor in the film who comes across as though she was born to do fantasy and superhero flicks.

Through all this, I found myself curious about Shiva’s and the prime antagonist Dev’s origin stories, but since Brahmastra is being stretched into a trilogy, we get to hear only a sliver of both in Part One. Although Shiva is named after the most intriguing of the three deities in the Hindu Holy Trinity, his background appears to have been inspired by Harry Potter. So is Dev, going by the passing description of him as being “not fully alive but not dead either, he just is” very much like Voldemort was after his apocalyptic, soul-splitting attack on the baby Harry.

A few months back, the Malayalam film industry had released Minnal Murali, which made no pretence of being anything but a desi take on American superhero cinema. The brilliance of director Basil Joseph’s film lay in the fact that despite this, he told a profoundly human story completely rooted in southern India and in Malayali culture. Brahmastra is superficial in its Hindu-ness, its MCU-ness, its Potter-ness, its Bollywood-ness and its humanity.

One Bollywood trope is not forgotten. In the climax, the awakening of a gargantuan cosmic force has the magical effect of mysteriously snatching the shirt off Ranbir’s body and giving us several minutes of his bare, well-sculpted, muscular torso. No complaints, but it was kinda funny.

Expensive does not translate into gripping. That’s the lesson from Brahmastra: Part One – Shiva.

Rating: 2 (out of 5 stars) 

Brahmastra is in theatres



Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial

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