It’s no surprise that Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana (also known as ‘Namit Malhotra’s Ramayana’, if you’re interested in monstrously insecure territory-marking) lives entirely in service of its bigness and digital shininess.
But perhaps the most unfortunate thing about Tiwari’s sprawling, synthetic epic is that it isn’t all that exciting to talk about.
Even bad films, middling films, noble misfires and ugly cash grabs offer something to hold onto and engage with. But when the act of discussion itself feels unexciting, it’s never a good sign. There’s little here that surprises or stands out, let alone thrills or delights.
Tiwari’s film is certainly successful in its “see-what-we-can-also-do-with-VFX”, “international-level” ambitions, instantly taking the standard of visual effects in Indian cinema to new heights. The sprawling landscapes and kingdoms, the digital wizardry, the detailing on many of the CGI creatures, the massively staged Gods-and-monsters action sequences, and so on.
I just wish Tiwari and his team were half as adept at injecting any sort of felt emotion or personality into this world as they are at inserting actors into virtual environments.
If all we want from an epic is scale, then this film certainly delivers. Its commitment to its visuals is undeniable. But that’s where a filmmaker, a storyteller, comes in: to guide the hands of hundreds of artists, VFX and otherwise, to mount an emotionally charged story driven by characters that we feel for and with. Put simply, without smallness—intimacy, conflict, drama, heart, human connective tissue—bigness risks feeling empty and unsticky.
I sincerely wonder how much of this film, or its moments, will remain with us a year from now. Don’t get me wrong, Ramayana is far too big, too expensive, too shiny, too colourful, too overwhelming, and makes too many strides for the visual possibilities of Indian blockbusters to not be watchable, bordering on worthwhile.
But very little of it is felt. I can’t, for example, think of a single relationship that sings or is even remotely affecting. The love between Ram (Ranbir Kapoor) and Sita (Sai Pallavi), the father-son bond between Ram and King Dashrath (Arun Govil), the brotherhood of Ram and Lakshman (Ravi Dubey), or even Ram and himself—not a single connection invokes feeling.
Spectacle More Than Storytelling
It’s why I couldn’t stop revisiting Baahubali through Tiwari’s film. SS Rajamouli’s landscape-defining two-part epic is a testament to infusing deeply affecting, thunderous drama into a mythological epic. Granted, that was an ‘original’ story that wasn’t shackled by doing justice to a sacred text. But Rajamouli borrowed many of the conflicts and building blocks from Valmiki’s spiritual saga, especially in terms of the Lord Ram character and his journey.
Amarendra Baahubali (Baahubali senior) was a manifestation of the gods, blessed with superhuman abilities and tasked with being the leader of his people. But Rajamouli managed to make the righteous saviour figure interesting, infusing him with personality—rage, cheekiness, humour, love and pain. In contrast, Ranbir Kapoor’s Lord Ram is a construct of fear.
The writing (by Tiwari, Shridhar Raghavan and Shreyas Jain) is too afraid and too vanilla to humanise him or make us feel any of what he does. The stiff, self-serious dialogue certainly doesn’t help.
Take the sequence of Lord Ram’s banishment, easily the emotional high point of the narrative. A parent is manipulated and forced to cast their beloved son out of their home. When Ramya Krishnan’s Sivagami is pushed to banish her son Baahubali, the scene is drenched in pain. You feel the rage and hurt in the very being of both mother and son. You witness hearts breaking. In contrast, here, when Lara Dutta’s Queen Kaikeyi forces King Dashrath’s hand to banish his beloved son, the sequence is merely going through the motions. Even Ranbir’s once-adored glassy eyes manage to do little.
What follows is the groundswell of Hans Zimmer’s effective score, which, in much of the film, doesn’t amplify emotion as much as it does the heavy lifting to create it. We’re not looking for flaws or faults in our mythical figures, just humanity.
Hindi cinema has a long tradition of making infallible, righteous, selfless, blessed do-gooders interesting. But here, whilst the story gives him plenty of opportunity to be affected, the film frames Lord Ram as a floating, detached figure with no emotional arc. There’s no sense of a young prince growing into a man, a leader, a warrior, a husband.
Even his impassioned, ‘angry’ speech when Sita is kidnapped is hardly stirring. Even as a saviour who’s all aura and glorious to behold in action, you feel little. Take the sequence of Lord Ram being the only one who can lift the bow at Sita’s Swayamvara in Mithila, or the one later on when he fends off hundreds of monsters to save Lakshman and Sita.
These are the film’s ‘mass moments’, but Tiwari struggles to amplify and milk them for all they’re worth. And when the narrative itself doesn’t hold you, we instantly become investigative journalists, constantly guessing and making smug observations about what is and isn’t real in a scene.
A Vibratingly Uninteresting Ranbir Kapoor
As Lord Ram, Ranbir Kapoor has never been this sauceless and uninteresting to watch. I didn’t think the actor was capable of such a stark performance.
He forces sincerity into Lord Ram with a (literal) vibrating intensity that is almost unsettling to watch. It’s as if he’s trying to force every ounce of goodness out of his blood vessels onto the screen.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the Ravana half of the film that soars. In the boundless fear that comes with bringing Valmiki’s sacred text to the big screen, Ravana was always the opportunity to imbue the character with imagination and personality. And they do.
The casting of Rocking Star Yash (here dubbed by Sharad Kelkar) is the film’s single greatest decision. It’s the (brief) Ravana origin story and his rise to power, becoming the ruler of Lanka, that holds you. So much so that whenever the narrative cuts away from a Ravana scene, the narrative immediately sighs.
A tremendous Yash has a feast with the character. Unlike almost every other member of the massive cast, the suffocation of blue screens can’t dim the superstar’s aura.
In Tiwari and Yash’s hands, Ravana is framed as an almost sympathetic figure. You understand him. You almost root for him. A young Dashanand is tasked with saving his people from a life of squalor. He travels the world and becomes the near-immortal Ravana, using his newfound power to crush his enemies, as a ruthless saviour wanting to protect his people. It’s a turbocharged superstar antihero origin story, if ever there was one.
Unimaginative Set Pieces
The opening Ravana onslaught, in which he single-handedly hacks through the Lanka army to claim it for his people, is also one of the film’s handful of decently imagined set pieces. For all its technical wizardry and overdesigned sequences, it’s curious how unexciting the design of the action is.
It’s almost funny how, even with a boundless budget and total virtual control of the image, we still struggle to stitch together a thrilling action sequence.
The constant hyper-cutting butchers even the briefest hand-to-hand combat scenes. The other variety of action here feels slightly more novel, with Ram and Lakshman fighting off giant CGI monsters in the forest. Whilst these might (visually) break new ground for Indian cinema, they feel derivative of set pieces we’ve seen elsewhere. It also doesn’t help that those forest sequences are the ones where the actors feel most divorced from their surroundings, and the virtual environments feel most awkward and synthetic.
Too often, people conflate the ‘quality’ of VFX with how they’re used. It’s not about how photorealistic the fur on the monster is. It’s what you do with the monster. Filmmakers like Amar Kaushik and Rajamouli understand that. Their computer-generated constructs are hardly immaculate, but it’s the imagination and design of their moments that make them so memorable. The one set piece from Tiwari’s film that soars, and borders on breathtaking, is the final Jattayu-Ravana face-off. Suddenly, and almost out of nowhere, choreography, imagination, emotional stakes and visual effects collide beautifully.
Still, for the most part, Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana is cinema that is rendered. The film offers a colourful, bright world, but struggles to mount a thoughtful narrative that guides us through it. Vast, vacuous visuals and flat, virtual environments are designed, but sequences aren’t felt.
Leaping to the next showboating sequence, the next carefully rendered kingdom, the next shiny establishing shot is more important than the emotional throughline of why we’re there, how we got there and where we go next.
Spectacle trumps storytelling.
Ramayana releases in theatres on 5 November.
(Suchin Mehrotra is a critic and film journalist who covers Indian cinema for a range of publications. He's also the host of The Streaming Show podcast on his own YouTube channel. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)