Finally managed to catch up with the 2nd most talked about movie in the (recent?) history of tamil cinema. This is simply about my experience with the movie, about my expectations and the after-effects.
My overall experience given my expectations was pretty neutral. I cannot say i enjoyed the movie but at the same time I will not say I was blind to its merits. In fact, given this was meant to be a commercial movie, I thought kamal almost came out with a winner. Almost..
What prevented the movie from conquering the box office as thoroughly as the boss? The following reasons were what i could muster on a very cursory note:-
- The biggest demerit to the movie was I felt Asin. Malayali actresses should never be given the role of a traditional girl, and even if this mishap were to occur, at least for the sake of public well being, never the role of a traditional brahmin girl. Asin does a way better job in western clothes uttering a few insignificant manna-to-the-masses kind of dialog. Her role as Andal would have surely outdone Jyothika’s much talked about performance in Kushi. Wo mee gads, the terrible cacophony that she created whenever she opened her mouth resulted in me having to close my ears out of sheer pain, much to the displeasure of the more tolerant fellow movie goers around me. And she was ably assisted in operation perforate-eardrum by the paati and khalifullah (kamal). When i left the movie hall, all I could think of was an irritating girl with a pretty face who is shouting random b.s. in a hyper-exaggerated tambram tongue. Seriously which normal man, let alone a hero, would want a partner like that??
- This leads us to the 2nd let-down of the movie. The really mediocre dialog. I’ll admit it evoked a few laughs and made sense most of the time (I lost drift of the classical tamil bits thanks to my complete inability to understand any other variation of the beautiful language apart from the beautiful dialect spoken in namma madras. For this of course I do not blame kamal). For a script of which kamal (having written it himself) said great things were to be expected, it was a complete let-down. The sentimental rubbish and philosophical rambling was simply unbearable. Amean the Singh youth giving that supposedly inspiring dialog when confronted by the doctor with his life choices was so 80s that I could not believe Kamal had anything to do with it. Few jokes evoked mild laughter while many other jokes such as those involving George Bush were completely lost on the audience. What could possibly be more pathetic than jokes which do not evoke laughter?
- The third biggest let down was the mujik. It was quite simply an insult to the ears. There was absolutely nothing imaginative about it. It was just plain dumb synthesised music. I am sure people like Ilaiyaraja, Harris Jeyaraj or even Vidyasagar would have done an infinitely better job. The music served simply one purpose. I watched the movie in Singapore and i dunno about other places, but there was no interval here. The songs however saw to it that this was not a problem. So we used the mukundha song for going mootharam and o o sanam song for our bojanam. Imagine my horror when i discovered that the only acceptable tune from the movie, kallai mattum, was lifted from an old malayalam movie starring Vikram. (I know!! What are the odds!!) http://youtube.com/watch?v=Afmc6FeN-hM
- The hero Kamal. Kamal has got to come around to the fact that he cannot go around playing scientist-youth-falling-in-love roles any more simply because he is neither a youth nor the superstar. It would have been much better if kamal had let someone like Madhavan (I might have said Vijay but I am sure even Vijay will laugh at the thought of him as a scientist) be the hero and himself had played a more entertaining character such as the gult officer Balram Naidu. Balram’s role as the RAW officer with a gultised tamil accent was by far the most entertaining high-point of the movie. He reminded me of that other enjoyable movie called Panchatantiram. It felt like the gult thatha himself had done the dubbing for kamal in this movie.
- Other things that sucked in the movie were mallika sherawat’s tamil, the japanese girl’s tamil (thank heavens i didn’t have to hear too much of that. I would have passed away in my seat itself.) and the incredibly irritating political correctness of kamal’s hero avatar which is a reflection of kamal’s real ideologies, i imagine. For instance, when Asin asks him if he claims there is no God, Kamal suggests it would be nice if there was one. Kamal may have of course imagined that this non-confirmative answer sounded cool, but I (for some damn reason) find it pathetically irritating. In fact, for the entire dialog in that scene with Asin after the tsunami, I had to close my ears lest i hear some inane philosophical crap from Kamal. Actually, (this is an update), I have come to realize that the last dialog really irritated me because I felt I could read what had gone on in Kamal’s mind. He must have faced all these questions from both himself and people around him regarding his atheist beliefs. And for every damn question, he probably tried to come up with the most smart-alec, non-confirmative answer he could muster, which instead of giving any real answers, simply leads to further questions. This entire role of (his-own-alter-ego)+(people-around-him) was voiced out in that scene by Asin and Kamal played the smart-alec answers giving youth. Bah…
The merits in the movie?? To be fair there are quite a few. For instance, the make-up and the graphics were, although not top of the line or entirely convincing, quite impressive for an indian movie. The ten roles were rather seamlessly blended together and for the most part, you forgot that it was Kamal essaying the ten characters. The last fight scene between the chappani youth and the vellaikara youth was quite stunning. I do not understand how it could have been done without using doubles for the majority of the scene. If it was indeed so, then it is quite mind-blowing.
All in all, the movie is a mishmash of 3 or 4 different movies squeezed into one with the resultant mixture being non-homogeneously sweet and sour at various times. However, I would definitely consider this a hallmark movie coming from India and would say that it is a must watch. Simply because this movie is, and is likely to remain, one of a kind. There is going to be no one else like Kamal Hasan in the near future and Kamal himself is not going to be stupid enough to attempt a magnum opus of this nature.
Update: My views on the plot
I find I did not mention what I thought about the plot of the movie and its basic premise. I did not think much about the plot and since it was a commercial movie, I thought my opinion on the plot would be irrelevant, but subsequently had to revise my opinion based on the comments from readers (ok, ok, I am just coming up with excuses for my own stupidity and negligence). For me the plot was FLAWED from its inception. It made very little sense to me. The chaos theory, which I first read about admittedly only after I saw The Butterfly Effect (lest you mistake me for some Peter-uttufying payal), I find has no relation at all with Dasavatharam’s plot. The chaos theory is only applicable to events where even the slightest perturbation in the initial conditions has a exponential multiplier effect and affects the final result profoundly. Events that do not depend on the initial events significantly aren’t really affected by this theory. In other words, the event under discussion must be deterministically random (eg. instantaneous noise parameters). The very idea of a bio-virus being released into the atmosphere and a tsunami striking at that precise instant to nullify it does not fall under the purview of chaos theory at all. So chaos theory as an explanation has absolutely no meaning at all. If Kamal is right, then we could well explain other things including Simbu’s latest hairstyle, the birth of Sam Anderson (check him on youtube) etc.. to chaos theory. I personally will not stand for this kind of chaos theory abuse. So the best way to watch this movie would be to leave your brains back and also bring a high frequency filter for your ears (this is for drowning out Asin’s voice). Happy watching, if you already haven’t done it that is.
To elucidate further, I have added my response to the comment from vinoth:-
1. certain events like the WW-II, their outcome do not really depend on the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in india or something. they depend on lot more concrete factors such as the strength of each army, the mindset of people etc..
2. certain events however depend very significantly on the environmental variables. for example assume a ball is precariously balanced on a mound and even the slightest change in the environment can affect the outcome of the direction in which it rolls off, then that is kind of related to chaos theory. here, although physics can be used to explain the direction in which the ball rolls off, you cannot predict it because of the highly sensitive nature of the environmental variables. ie. deterministic chaos.
in effect, all events are correlated. but the degree to which they depend on each other may vary. If an event is (percentage-wise) highly dependent on even seemingly inconsequential events, then chaos theory can afford an explanation.
kamal’s plot falls in the first category and hence you cannot really write down the occurrence of the tsunami to chaos theory. kamal had this half-baked understanding of the theory and this made the plot quite poor.
