15 November,2024 07:23 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
A still from Kanguva
Well, it's bit of a reductive thought to assume that a movie is a story. Only a story is a story. A movie is an experience, isn't it? Let me briefly take you through this experience then. Rather than let you in much on this picture's plot, that is so barren, there's nothing you can farm on it anyway.
Hence, I plonk myself in the front row of the first show of this film, i.e.Kanguva (literally, man with power of fire).
Few theatre owners are intuitive enough to recognise that the cinema's first row, unlike all the others behind it, deserves permanent recliner seats - for you to suitably lie down, put your legs up, and allow the eyes to travel easier, upwards and sideways of the screen, that's right over your head.
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The newly opened Miraj Cinema in Wadala, Mumbai, offers this simple luxury/courtesy. Only one other (PVR) screen, in Juhu, does the same.
This Miraj used to be Big Cinemas IMAX for the longest - until it couldn't survive the onslaught of the pandemic. It's returned to Mumbai, totally jazzed up with interiors sufficiently renovated. I'm one of its early customers. The excitement is understandable.
The screen opens to long sequences from pre-history, with tribes from centuries ago, mumbling to each other about how there's no such thing in life as coincidence. Everything is destined.
The screen switches over to the present, which is what, if not the futuristic sci-fi - set in a research centre in Russia, from where a boy, who was a guinea pig for a cerebral experiment, runs away.
Straightaway, he slips into a desi maal-gaadi (goods' train) that, we learn later, brings him down to Goa!
These Goa portions are young, hip, with two hot bounty hunters, Disha Patani, Suriya, along with bumbling assistant, Yogi Babu, Tamil cinema's omnipresent Johnny Lever - chilling on beaches, bathtubs, dancing, singing, when they aren't out to nab criminals, on behalf of local cops.
The song is titled YOLO, as in You Only Live Once, which sounds illogical. Don't you die only once, but live every day? Or YOLO means you've got only one life! That rings even more untrue for a film that is effectively about reincarnation.
But these aren't the thoughts going through my head. I'm thoroughly lapping up the 3D of Kanguva as various objects - ice cubes, shards of glass, gems, coins - dart through the eyes.
The projection captures the overall 3D, remarkably. That's because, at no point does the movie ever descend into semi-darkness.
The screen is always well-lit. Night scenes, or dim lights in general, in a 3D movie, is a common mistake, when eyeglasses have darkened the projection so much, that you can barely catch much, eventually. Only thumb-prints on your lens show.
Also, the bass in the theatre is thumping through my bum. The sound feels as immersive as the vast vistas for visuals, for the perfect eye-to-screen distance.
God, I've missed this Wadala multiplex - that had India's first IMAX screen. An elixir of life for film buffs in Mumbai's eastern suburb - also, the preferred venue for some of the biggest premieres in Bollywood (3 Idiots, Black, Paa, Saawariya, etc).
Why spend so much time discussing a theatre? Well, what is cinema, if not the cinema, first, no? The makers of Kanguva know this. Therefore, they've reportedly pumped in around R350 crore on this film, chiefly on the production.
As you can tell, all through - with the VFX, action, choreography, photography, production design⦠Basically the whole movie as a series of money-shots.
Pull out their list of technicians, and you can safely hand them most of the year's top technical category awards. Director Siva has taken equal credit for story and screenplay. He needn't have bothered.
At the centre of this gigantic enterprise is, of course, Suriya, looking every bit the strikingly broad, six-pack action star, meant to pull in audiences. Yeah, he's given it his all. For what? Let's see.
There are two Suriyas for the price of one. The hero flits between the years 2024 and 1070. But remains chiefly in the latter.
Romans are apparently attacking his island, but he's busy fighting the villain from the neighbouring tribe - that is half-man, half-beast, perennially growling Bobby Deol, with a thick furry cape, as if there's another man stuck to him from behind.
The hero and a little boy are related from their previous birth. I asked my co-viewers to explain some of the befuddling details of this past, that is supposedly essential to the plot.
None could help. So, it's not just me, seeming lost, for the never-ending film's terrible Hindi dub, in the first place.
Think of Kanguva as an SS Rajamouli tentpole (Baahubali, RRR). More likely, Magadheera, given reincarnation for the subject. Only, without Rajamouli's master-writer K Vijayendra Prasad's scripts. Prabhas starrer Salaar (2023) comes closest.
Kanguva tops it still. What remains then is Siva-Suriya's screechy, soulless, senseless, cent per cent stunning spectacle.
Can I not just revel in the perfect sound and seat, marvelling at dead humans piled up to form a mountain, in one scene; or the brilliant fight-plus-dance over Shiva's tandav, in the other?
Yeah, I could - carry on watching in admiration, feeling nothing. In fact, I did. Just unsure of my mental health, at the moment.
