'Ra.One' makes for winning sci-fi - Movie Review
October 30, 2011
Starring Shahrukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Armaan Verma
Superhero action-adventure Ra.One—the most expensive Indian film to date and boasting special effects that are equal to that of any Hollywood production—is a quintessential Indian family film that absorbs sci-fi into its panoply of genre with ease. It's exuberant, goofy, thrilling, and sweetly touching, with a conflict that's not really about the epic struggle between good and evil. The protagonist's mission is personal—he's not out to save the world, but rather a family, specifically a little boy, and he does so more through love than physical heroics. That makes him a different kind of superhero—an incredibly relatable one.
The story is never overwhelmed by the action, even though the action is stupendous, particularly a car chase scene through London with a video-game villain come to life and a runaway train sequence with the hero hopscotching from car to car before crashing into Mumbai's iconic Victoria Terminus.
Sure, Ra.One borrows from a host of other sci-fi movies and the story is far from ingenious—but the same can be said of most sci-fi flicks. The genre isn't exactly brimming with originality.
Ra.One is not Indian cinema's first foray into sci-fi—its predecessors notably include last year's outstanding Tamil film Robot, starring Rajinikanth, who makes a cameo in Ra.One as his Robot character for no other reason than to be acknowledged for his groundbreaking role.
Bollywood stars Priyanka Chopra and Sanjay Dutt also make cameos, appearing in the film's lush opening video-game dream sequence. The plot then kicks off with a dorky dad, Shekhar, who wants to impress his son, Prateek, a cool kid, by developing a video game in which the villain, Ra.One, can't lose. Ra.One breaks out of the virtual world and into the real one to kill Prateek, the only person who has played the game, and the game's good guy, G.One, comes to the rescue—as best he can against an undefeatable player.
Actress Kareena Kapoor is at her engaging best as Shekhar's adoring wife—she and Khan sparkle together. The sinewy, statuesque Arjun Rampal puts his dramatic bone structure to good use as the sinister title character—although there's not enough tension in his tangles with the hero. The real standout is child actor Armaan Verma, who plays Prateek—he's a scene-stealer, and that's saying something considering his company. And then of course, there's the main draw, Shahrukh Khan, who plays both Shekhar and G.One.
Double roles are extremely common in Bollywood films and most big stars have played them at one time or another, but Khan has done so with more regularity, usually portraying a geek and a stud (Main Hoon Na, Paheli, Don, Om Shanti Om, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi). The two characters tend to bleed into one another—there's always a little bit of the stud in the geek and the geek in the stud. In Khan's case, it's an example of the way in Indian film that the actor is consciously channeled through the character. Khan himself embodies the contradiction of geek and stud. He’s a small man, not a beefcake like many of his fellow male stars (although he sure pumped up for Ra.One), handsome but not in a pinup sense, and while he oozes charisma and charm, he has an overriding nervous quality. Off-camera, he revels in his stardom, even hams it up as if he were playing a part, but he always seems like he can't quite believe he's getting away with it. Nonetheless, he is Bollywood's biggest romantic hero, the dreamy fantasy of swooning millions.
On-screen, Khan is nearly always self-reflexive, as is Indian film in general (making Khan the perfect ambassador for his industry). So the preposterousness of sci-fi works beautifully here—as it did in Robot. So far, Indian film hasn't treated sci-fi with dead seriousness the way Hollywood has, and that's what makes it so much fun.
Ra.One is rated Must See.
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