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| I wish I could say this wasn't a scene from a movie about robots. |
I am speechless. I... I just don’t... I mean... What the fuck?
2010 was a year for cinema that we will think back on for days to come. Epic tales of love and romance. Comedies that made us forget what it was to be sad. Dramas filled with yearning and tragedy. And then there is this film, Endhiran.
This movie is an orgy of excess. Imagine Terminator 2, Bride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, I am Robot, Bicentennial Man, Blade Runner and The Matrix all mashed up into one huge mess of celluloid and you kind of get the idea of what I just sat through. It was almost too much.
Now, I’m not what you would call an expert on world cinema, especially this new fandangle Bollywood craze that seems to have sprung up over the last few years. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen the occasional scene or two while waiting for my naan bread from Miss India, but that’s probably the extent of my experience. But if any of these other Tamil films comes even close to this one, I’m sure I will be seeing them all very soon.
The story begins with a Professor creating a robot (both are played by Indian personality Rajinikanthin in a dual role) in his lab, which comes to be known as Chitti, which is a pretty shitti name for a robot, but that’s beside the point. The professor apparently spent so long in his lab that he grew a full beard and now his girlfriend (played by the incredibly sexy Aishwarya Rai, who I imagine tastes like Lamb Madras) is angry at him. Surprise, a woman kicking up a piss about something a man did.
Anyway, the robot goes around for the first few hours doing good deeds and generally getting in the way a bit, much to the chagrin of Professor Vaseegaran, who feels that the robot is stealing his spotlight in a big way. When the robot starts hitting on his girlfriend he takes an axe to it and throws it in the trash, only to have it picked up by his rival who turns Chitti into an evil robot hell bent on getting his robo-dick wet. And really, who can blame him? He then makes like a billion clones of himself and a few robot lions for kicks and a song. Then he uses a lightsaber to kill a dozen UNSC Spartans.
The rest of the movie is... well, you really need to see it to believe it. It plays out like the fevered ravings of a mad man. Here are just a few of the things you’ll see while watching this movie:
· A robot delivering a baby.
· A robot talking to mosquitoes.
· A robot fighting a train car full of thugs.
· A robot rescuing naked people from a fire that later get run over by trucks.
· A robot doing a robo-dance, robo-kungfu and other robot related things.
· A hundred robots connecting to build a giant robot.
· The aforementioned giant robot turning into a giant robot snake, made of robots, that eats cars.
You kind of see where I’m going with this. There is a distinct theme emerging. I don’t know if they wanted us to question the ethics of artificial intelligence with this film, some sort of ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep’ kind of deal, but I find myself unable to. It’s like they tried for a hard hitting morality and fell utterly short.
Also, during this movie the professor grows like 6 beards, and Chitti seems to go through a dozen wigs with one that even has lightning bolt sideburns, so you know he’s bad ass. And every time there is a musical number the people change entire costumes seemingly at whim. What the fuck? And what the hell is with all the song and dance routines anyway? You could be sitting through a completely dramatic scene and the BAM random musical number. It’s like they had a song and dance quota to fill for this movie. It’s not as if it’s a short film either, it is literally three fucking hours long.
The film is pretty heavily reliant on CGI, so you’d think that would be the one this they’d like to get right. Right? Wrong. The special effects and animation are so bad it looks like some teenager on youtube has done them. The animation stands out like your granddads ball sack hanging out of his shorts, staring like dumb kid with autism would. My favourite bits were when they just flat out gave up and started using a guy in a robot suite instead of the CGI robot. I don’t know if they thought they were being clever by cutting a corner and expecting us not to notice, or they simply thought ‘fuck it, it’s not like they’ll be taking us seriously anyhow.’
I will give this movie some big props for having a surprisingly good soundtrack. It’s mostly an Indian spin on Daft Punk with a lot of techno mixes of more traditional songs. I must say it both suited the movie and its mood brilliantly.
Now, you may think I’ve just gone and pointed out the zaniest parts of the movie for a good laugh, but you’d be wrong. What I have done here is just scrape the surface of a vast and deep pool of nonsense and explosions. This film is so long and so overfull with pointless scenes and CGI that I can’t even remember half of the ridiculous shit that went on in it.
This movie is what I imagine Charlie Sheen’s brain to be like on meth and red cordial. It is 177 minutes of everything that was cool in the 1990’s. It’s so far beyond ridiculous we really need to invent a new word to describe it. Bolludacris.
It’s badly done, it’s so far over the top it treats the top like a midgets head, the story is confusing and roughly 50% of the movie is there as filler, but I can’t bring myself to dislike it. It’s an amazing film that took 2 years and $38 million to make, which is like the gross national income of India.
See it if you are naive enough to think your mind and body is prepared for the full might in Indian cinema.
Aishwarya Rai, you so fine, I wanna sex you up like it ain’t no thang.
