Kalki 2898 AD movie review: Kalki may have Prabhas as the headliner, but it is Amitabh Bachchan all the way — his Ashwatthama is suitably gravelly and towers over the film. Kamal Haasan comes on sparingly but does leave an impact.
A couple of things wrestled for front-of-cortex space while I was watching ‘Kalki 2898 AD’: this Telugu language sci-fi film, set in, what else, 2898 AD, is the first comprehensive pan-Indian film. The trend which has been gathering force in the last few years has resulted in a cast which is drawn, literally, from all the major filmmaking centres in India, straddling Bengal and Kerala, and everything in between.
And the other was just how hard it is for Indian tent poles to have a screenplay which is tight and gripping all the way through. I can’t remember a recent film of this staggering size and scale, mounted with such ambition, being such a plod to begin with.
Pre-interval, Kalki, which happily borrows its aesthetics from all kinds of futuristic films (with flashes of Mad Max, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Lord of The Rings, and even, yes, a glimpse of the godawful Adipurush, and, of course, the Bahubali-RRR slate, showing major indebtedness to the Amar Chitra Katha universe) meanders, stops and starts, remembers that it needs to bung in a set piece here and a set piece there, and then slumps back again. Oh, and how did I forget Bladerunner, and Dune in terms of influences? The latter is an ‘inspiration’ for the film’s posters, in both image and font. Hard to believe? Check it out for yourself.
The second half, which is clearly reserved for the big-hero-villain-confrontations, shakes things up somewhat, and saves the film from being a total snoozefest. And it redeems itself, just in the nick of time, by a rousing climax, where everyone comes out, literally, all guns blazing.
As it goes about setting the scene, doing the world-building thing, introducing us to its myriad characters, it is a hard sell. Yes, there’s Amitabh Bachchan as Ashwatthama, the mighty saviour, who has survived several ‘sadis’, from the age of the Mahabharat to ‘kaliyuga’, and the time that it is set in, where the last avatar of Vishnu is meant to appear to save the world. Talk to the hand, and also, read the Puranas, where this is a much-beloved prophecy. Of course, it is a Hindu rashtra (but then the film does say that it is inspired by the Hindu scriptures), and set in Kashi, ‘where Ma Ganga has dried up washing away our sins’, as a character puts it, so maybe that’s why there’s so much Hindu iconography, just like in the Baahubali-RRR films. But those were period films. Is this what the future holds? Ooh.
And yes, there’s Kamal Hassan as the evil Supreme Yaskin, who lords over the ‘Complex’, a utopian city which hovers over Kashi, the only liveable city left in a world gone desiccated and dry. His entourage includes Commander Manas (Saswata Chatterjee, trying hard to muster up adequate menace, and managing to hit the mark once or twice), and a curly-haired soothsayer (Anil George) who talks darkly about divine intervention and ancient weapons (behold the ‘Gandeeva dhanush’) being supercharged again.