Ranbir Kapoor’s Brahmastra is delightful to look at but horrible to listen to

In a scene from the recently released Brahmastra, Shiva (Ranbir Kapoor) is requested by Guruji, played by Amitabh Bachchan to join Brahmansh, a kind of clan that protects Brahmastra, the potentially hazardous weapon at the heart of Ayan Mukherji’s film. “Aap aise bol rahe ho jaise koi Diwalki Dhamaka Offer ho,” Shiva responds. Even within the world of a film that marries Indian mythology to the cult of the modern superhero, this kind of conversation, its abrupt shift in tone feels odd, almost bemusingly unreal. The problem is that while the film is more than decent to watch, it is bafflingly juvenile to listen to. Here people talk as if they don’t know if they have urban or rural anchorage, or whether they are reliving history or merely visiting it from a modern standpoint. In fact, for all its visual flair, Brahmastra is horrifyingly juvenile to listen to.

The key to Shiva’s power is ‘his button’. He discovers over the course of the film that ‘his button’ is Isha. These are actually words exchanged between characters in some of the tensest scenes from the film. At other points Brahmastra feels an awkward mix of both English and Hinglish. The word ‘light’ is used interchangeably with roshni, and for some reason the two switch places. “Tumse mila aur light mil gayi,” Shiva says at one point. You kind of get what the actor is going for, but what he says is clumsy and unyielding it would make any woman on the planet tear up and run in the other direction.

There is a clear issue here with the use of language, a randomised mixed of chaste Hindi, some Urdu and select English. Brahmastra wishes to be accessible, in a local but ultimately global sense. It’s probably why it continuously gargles with eminently horrendous theories about light and darkness, that would sound much better had they been sieved through the machinery of a single language. Instead, we get a mix of some terribly ineffective, at times preposterous dialogue that sounds like it is the result of a quick google translate or an AI algorithm used to clutch boilerplate material from similar other epics of international cinema.

Lyrical scriptwriting is rarely Bollywood’s forte but in Brahmastra even basic conversations that must deal with the mundanity of life sound like they have been uttered at a B-grade mushaira. “Sahi waqt aane mein bhi waqt lagta hai”, Guruji says at one point, without the gravitas or the crutch of actual poetry to fall back on. In one scene Junoon, played by the largely effective Mouni Roy stands atop a makeshift shanty in a remote Himachal village overlooking a few dozen farmers she has just converted into an army. “Swagat hai humari sena mein,” she announces, with the kind of self-referential cockiness that reminded me of the “Swagat nahi karoge humara” meme throughout.

If you had to reason, you could argue Brahmastra is trying to bring together different worlds, one in which Shiva is an urban DJ/Orphan saviour and the other that has its roots in Brahminical mythological ideas. But this collision of worlds is never quite acknowledged within the world of the film, foremost through the troublingly oblique use of language. Even left to their own devices, the two worlds rarely offer something akin to conversational relatability. The trailer of the film itself had warned of clunky writing, but the bar in its entirety is so low, that the impressive visual aesthetic is consistently undermined by dialogue that sounds the same coming from the film’s adults, gurus and their adolescent subjects.

“Tum ameer ho. Jahan main jaa raha hun woh ameer nahi hai,” Shiva tells Isha the first time they meet. This is probably the most underwhelming yet pointy conversation I’ve witnessed on screen. It mirrors a lack of understanding of how people, especially those who belong to a certain circle of society speak. We’ve been told repeatedly over the last year that this film has been painstakingly, yet lovingly made. That love, however, it seems had been reserved for scale and not the soul. For the film can definitely fly but rarely return to have a conversation that actually feels lived-in, earthy and believable. Mainstream cinema, of late has been transformed into a spectacle, but the visual grandness of it alone cannot sustain a story that also needs to be rooted in emotion. Emotion that, at the end of the day, needs words and a language to express itself in. Not muddled, virginal sentences that seem like they have been spit out by AI algorithms trying to imitate the worst of Hindi cinema’s history.

Brahmastra isn’t all bad, of course, for it does manage to ramp up scale rarely seen in Hindi cinema, but every time it meanders towards a story linking all that startling imagery together, it fumbles, all because of conversations that seem and sound like they belong in an alternate dimension where everyone is a clinically diagnosed man-child with no instinct for sound, tone, pitch, poetry or comprehension. It is probably indicative of the fact that the makers were so occupied trying to set the film’s visual boundaries, they forget to revisit and evaluate and revisit a salient, but essential aspect of the process – writing. Never before, other than maybe on Instagram have I seen iconic actors say something with the baritone of poesy and yet sound tragically like lunatics. “Apne darr ko bhi pyaar do,” Guruji says in another scene at which point I gave up trying to write down the chunks that the Brahmastra word salad kept throwing at me with no origin in poetry, prose or at times, even reason.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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