Unlike a typical movie review which starts with a suspense-spoiler-alert, this one needs a suspenselessness-spoiler-alert. But then, the title of the post has already given away the fact that the movie has no original plot after all.

Shuffling into our seats five minutes late, mumbling apologies, secretly glad that our sheepish faces couldn’t be seen, we didn’t know what we had missed. Later, a helpful friend mentioned that a song, a mind-boggling leap worth watching and a kidnapping had all taken place in those critical initial minutes. Well, this is yet to be verified. But, given that any school-going kid knows the story of Ramayana, we could imagine not only what we had missed, but also whatever we were yet to watch. (A moment of pause: the new generation of kids who know Potter and Bond better than good old Rama and Arjuna might be forgiven for thinking that the injury-kidnap-revenge saga is a modern invention.)

I had some reservations watching a Tamil movie because I was certain that it would be sub-titled in English, and for a compulsive reader, sub-titles are profoundly distracting. In hindsight, I am glad to have watched the Tamil version and not the Hindi one firstly because the cast is better in Tamil (not everyone has what I would term the screen presence required for a villain who is allotted the screen time normally reserved for a hero)  and secondly because the dialogues and songs are better too. Of course, this is a moot point…

Coming to the story. There is a boat, a guy who could be the hero or the villain, a girl and some others. Since the girl is bound and gagged, and the guy seems quite proud of it, you guess that he must be the villain. Veera and Ragini have made their entry! By the way, for the uninitiated: when I say “boat”, please don’t get the idea of a blue-coloured plastic-bodied motorised dinghy.  Instead imagine a wooden structure, completely bio-degradable, in tune with all the mind-blowing greenery in the movie.

Let me confess that, since I had not done any prior googling, at this point it had not struck me that Raavanan was purported to be an interpretation of Ramayana. I had imagined that the reference to one of world’s oldest villains was purely symbolic and that the setting would be a modern city or at least a village. So, when Dev, the inspector, encounters the drunkard on the way to the forest, I naively wonder at the audacity of the latter. But when he swings across tree-branches, there is a moment of epiphany – so this is Hanuman, which means that is Rama, and those were Ravana (to use the usual English spelling) and Sita. Now some things have fallen into place. Although mildly disappointed that the story has become predictable, I tell myself that a landmark movie like Jurassic Park would have been only slightly less enjoyable even if I had read the book.

Jatayu, the discarded pushpaka vimana and other indispensables of Ramayana follow in quick progression. Before the audience gets engrossed in predicting which scene of Ramayana comes next, songs make their way in. A. R. Rehman and Karthik have done a decent job in ‘usure pogudhey’. There are some other songs as well, at appropriate places. (Of course, there rarely is an appropriate place for a song except perhaps as a background score. Indian movie directors irrespective of the language seem to think the exact opposite.)

The acting is reasonable if expectations are kept reasonably low. Clearly, that is not the selling factor of the movie anyway. The camera-work is far more impressive. In a variation from the usual sequential narration, images are superimposed to show what happened just minutes ago as Dev follows the trail of Veera. Also, there are scenes where the comical and the serious are juxtaposed. But instead of reinforcing the gravity, the comical aspect dilutes the seriousness; the “demon in a king’s palace” dialogue by Veera is one instance that comes to mind. There are also other striking dialogues that act as saving graces at times. For example, Veera asks how he could have killed someone with no fear of death in her eyes.

Towards the end when Dev casts aspersions on Ragini, it comes as a discordant note. Bringing in the lie-detector idea was unnecessary and incongruous. And once the train of improbable scenes has begun, there is no turning back. So Dev does nothing when his wife alights from the train in the middle of a forest. (It goes without saying that everything in the movie happens in forest settings.) Ok, Dev did nothing because has a purpose – he wants to settle more scores with Veera. And he can be mindlessly cruel when he is desperate. But what about the guard and the conductor of the train? It is not very pleasant to imagine that if you pull the chain, stop the train and get off, you can walk away, no questions asked, as if you were on a bus! But then, once you accept whatever has happened in the movie till then, this is a negligibly small leap of faith.

On a less criticising note, the movie has some merits as well – the skill with which the greenery has been captured (the backdrop of the climactic good vs evil battle which becomes a white vs black fist-fight), the attention with which natural beauty has been depicted (remember the dragonfly?), and the vibrant display of colours (the wedding of Veera’s sister). But here again I cannot help asking: weren’t some of the colours a little too rich? Somehow I don’t seem to have noticed such rich colours in a real forest or wedding!

Bottomline: I have always felt that hype is almost never worth it. And nothing in the movie has changed this feeling.

<Personal opinion disclaimer applies.>