Robot

Director: Shankar

Actors: Rajinikanth, Aishwarya Rai, Danny Denzongpa, Karunas, Santhanam, Kalabhavan Mani

Rajnikanth is back. And what a bang he makes! At 61, the much worshipped Indian star does the unthinkable. If you thought only Sylvester Stallone could do an action film at 60 plus, you got to watch Robot. The film is yet another show-reel for the star who so effectively went on to become one of the biggest India stars internationally. But more importantly it is a show-reel for director Shankar and an example for other Indian directors to emulate.

Robot (Enthiran) does not essentially have the most interesting story. Nor is it believable. It's about a robot, which is developed by ace scientist Vaseegaran (Rajnikanth). Vaseegaran invests 10 years of his life on the robot with a dream of gifting it to the Indian army. But when he is done the robot is branded as dangerous as it does not have emotions. Vaseegaran works on it and tried programming emotion into it. While his experiment works, it creates clashes in his personal life as the Robot falls in love with his girlfriend (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan). There is also Vaseegaran's guru Professor Bohra (Danny Danzongpa) who has his evil motives and wants Vaseegaran's creation for himself.

We have seen emotions in a robot in Bicentennial Man (1999) and we have also seen machines going bad in movies like I, Robot (2004). But Robot is not similar to any and has its own storyline.

The screenplay moves to a definite end. The dialogues (Hindi) have been done well and they manage to keep the comic element alive, wherever necessary. The film is shot extremely well - money spent on it showing on each shot that is taken. It is edited stylishly. Sound designing - a key area in a science fiction like this - is top notch. And so is the background music. The only glitches probably are the songs. They lyrics are not exactly poetic and neither is it AR Rahman's best work. But then, you would hardly listen to lyrics considering the visuals are as arresting and choreography as grand.

Rajnikanth scores in his performances. He carries two roles really well. While on one hand he needs to play an absorbed scientist he plays the mechanical robot with equal ease. Aishwarya looks ravishing and does her bit very effectively. It's remarkable that both leads don't look anything close to their actual age. Ditto with Danny, who looks dapper and puts up class act.

But then the real star of the film, while giving due respect to Rajnikanth, is the special effects in the last half an hour. The final action sequence is equivalent to top-grade VFX shown by a top grosser internationally. Director Shankar truly deserves a pat on his back for his vision and managing to pull this up. This is easily the best in Indian films ever.

Overall, Robot is going to be a trendsetter. Shankar shows that he could very well keep the Indian sensibilities intact while making a top of the line science fiction in line with Hollywood films. Of course at almost 3 hours long Robot is a very long exercise and that takes away some marks. But watching Rajnikanth - the boss perform is priceless!

At the start of this film, after the presenter's name (Sun TV's Kalanidhi Maran), and before the film's title (Robot; Endhiran in Tamil), the screen screams out letters in a font twice the size of both. The silver alphabets spell out 'Superstar Rajnikanth', the hero's name. I was at a theatre sparsely populated, low-key, given a press show. I could hear crowds going berserk at that moment. Audiences in Tamil Nadu, I am told, would have lit up fire crackers indoors by now, thrown coins at the stage, cracked open coconuts, begun their biennial prayers like religious rituals inside the movie theatre. They're probably doing so, as we speak. Stuff like this makes films for films' sake redundant. And opinion of any kind, quite pointless.

Rajnikanth is the closest human approximation to god from an organised faith. Both are ageless in their airbrushed figures. Both demand believers, and complete devotion to unquestioned legends. You can't explain God. You can't explain Rajnikanth. Being critical of either can invite extreme public wrath. Blasphemy is best avoided. I tread on thin ice, you can tell! No sweat still.

This is India's most expensive blockbuster. Each crore spent over every minute of this movie shows, if you watch it for the spectacle alone. The sheer scale and special effect of this film remains hitherto unsurpassed in Indian cinema. The film smartly borrows from the genre's Hollywood tradition, right from Terminator to Transformers. Which is to say, there is yet an emotional connect.

While I haven't been on Rajnikanth's previous pilgrimages called Baba (2002) or Sivaji (2007) to figure their universal appeal, it's easy to judge, Robot takes Superstar (that being his first name) beyond the mythology of his home state. For one, Rajni Sir, in this movie, isn't a folk hero testing the bounds of human antics. He is himself an "andro-humanoid". There is external logic to the madness on the movie screen.

Most of India that calls a restaurant a hotel, calls robot, Robert. The pretentiously suave pronounce it with a silent 't' ('ro-bo'), and those on a diet of American films call it robot (as in 'ro-bought'). This one's called Chitti. He has a memory of "1 zeta-byte", speed of "1 terra-hertz" and combined creative intelligence of 100 humans. His inventor (Superstar, again) is a top scientist at an artificial intelligence lab in Chennai, who bears Carnegie Mellon and Stanford as legit stamps on his CV.

Chitti needs accreditation from the government to be recruited in the army as proxy for mortal soldiers. He can be of practical use to his country. There's one issue. The guarantors demand he be fed with human emotions to respond subjectively to instructions. You see the point. He could go wild otherwise.

But these feelings the robot is forced to learn causes problems of its own. Chitti falls for his creator's girl (Aishwarya). He becomes prone to human manipulations, especially the villain's (Danny Denzongpa), who eventually reassembles him into a callous weapon of mass destruction. Chitti goes bang bang. This is sweet premise for any sci-fi pic. And yet there you go: there is Superstar Rajni as the hero (the loved robot), the villain (the bad robot), and the geek (the scientist lover). In that din of his devotees, one rarely credits this 61-year-old leading man for his acting prowess. This is super stuff by any performance standards.

Very soon as bad Chitti begins to mutate himself, design his own clones, there are so many Superstars on screen, you literally lose count. A planet full of humanoid Rajnikanths, on serious rampage, or as slate.com subtly describes him, "If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be" this!

Leave aside jokes running on the Internet. This film, just a few feet too long, is fine entertainment by itself. I'm evidently an atheist to this religion, so I guess, you can trust this note.

Those in the know are aware that 'superstar' Rajnikanth is perceived to be in the image of god. Rajni makes fewer mistakes during the course of a film, than god. In "Robot" this perception is taken a step further as Rajni creates a robot - in his own image.

Robotics scientist Vashikaran (Rajni) creates a humanoid robot Chitthi (Rajni). After Chitthi's inability to feel causes him to be rejected from inclusion in the Indian Army, Vashikaran tries to create feelings in him, and thanks to a freak of nature, succeeds. Only it causes problems, as Chitthi falls in love with Vashikaran's fiancee Sana (Aishwarya Rai). As the creator and creation are locked in a jealous battle against each other, the jealous robotics scientist Dr. Bohra plans to misuse Chitthi for wrong objectives.

Anyone who has seen a Rajnikanth film understands that often it is not the story that makes the film a success, but Rajni's antics. There are plenty of them in the film. And, for once, his conception as a robot gives Rajni the logic, to lack logic.

There are gravity defying stunts, shooting with a finger, running horizontally at high speed on the side of a train, flying cars and bikes, corny but hilarious dialogues -- e.g. after grabbing and pointing scores of guns at the police, he says 'Happy Diwali' before firing a salvo of bullets; or when the robot is asked his address and gives his IP address. It's not just god, the universe and its logic itself is recreated in the film.

Director Shankar who has a penchant for double image, multiple images and split images of his heroes returns this time with hundreds of images of Rajnikanth. The inspiration of Hollywood, most predominantly the "Matrix" trilogy (stunts choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping of "Matrix" fame), "The Mask", "I, Robot", and many Frankenstein movies are evident, but not overbearing.

Where Shankar scores is the ingenious conception of stunts. The allegedly 'poorer' cousin of Bollywood, the south Indian film industry, has been growing leaps and bounds in the special effects department. And with a little help from Hollywood, like in "Robot", it soars.

"Robot", however, cannot boast of good music, so crucial for an Indian film. A.R. Rahman's decision to rely on robotic sounds, which we have heard close to three decades back in films like "Robocop", fails to inspire. He could have at least conceptualised them more intelligently.

The Hindi dubbed version is saved by Swanand Kirkire's translation that prevents the dialogues from becoming jarring like previous dubbings of South Indian films. Yet, he could not salvage the songs, whose gibberish lyrics are seemingly out of a time warp from films in the 1990s (remember the Prabhu Deva starrer "Kadhalan" again directed by Shankar with music composed by Rahman).

Aishwarya's character is as conventional as expected. She's the chaste love interest, the damsel in distress who has time and again to be saved from being raped, and who is nothing more than eye candy.

Two words begin with the letter 'R' and are synonymous: Religion and Rajnikanth. A third has now been added to cinema folklore, 'Robot'. And with the largest number of prints ever for an Indian film and a global release, this sexagenarian actor might still enter world cinema folklore. After all, Rajnikanth can make no mistakes.