Brahmastra
There's a montage in the movie's second half where Shiva (Ranbir) learns how to control the fire for the first time. He then starts dancing to experience the joy of the accomplishment and the next few minutes seem like footage from Ayan Mukherji (Director)'s second movie Ye Jawani hai Diwani.
The scale of Ayan's ambition is commendable. The desire to create India's version of the metaverse and make it relevant to the deeply jingoistic society is a worthy and lofty goal. The fact that this movie took more than five years to shoot may have led to the team revisiting the script, screenplay, and dialogues many times, thus complicating it.
The dialogues seem to have not registered well with the audience. Reports suggest that Ayan got Hussain Dalal to do the dialogues to make the movie accessible to a larger audience. I wonder if Ayan wanted to cater to all cohorts of the Indian population and not alienate people who wouldn't get the reference to the Hindu mythological context. Astraverse gets introduced in Amitabh Bachan's voice at the movie's beginning. Although they did try to make it simple, I think it needed more world-building.
The characters, too, needed to be established instead of just being shown to us in their immediate vicinity. I can't help but compare the movie with RRR, where both Ram and Bheem got excellent introduction scenes which told us who they were in their most authentic essence. In contrast, we see Shiva and Isha (Alia Bhatt) seeing each other for the first time in a pandal. We get to see Shiva's life a bit in the chal he lives, but I couldn't help but see how the chal looked more like a rich man's idea of a chal than an actual chal in Mumbai. Every time we see the chal, it's lit up due to a festival, and Ayan cleverly shoots scenes only in open areas like a Terrace or a large living room (convenient?) because he cannot afford to see his actors in a cramped space.
Isha tears up when she hears Shiva's appreciation of life despite all the hardships he has gone through. That must mean Isha has self-awareness of her place in society. I would have loved to know how did she grow into such awareness. There's no backstory to Isha except that she is from London and is visiting India.
I find it challenging to place Ranbir in a lower middle-class setup or even as a religious person. His scenes where he is praying look dishonest, and he is not your first choice for a mega-action sequence. He looks too good, even after a car chase scene where he almost dies. He doesn't sweat even when he saves the world through 'love' hence needing more support from the background score.
Despite all these shortcomings, the movie has its share of highs. The VFX effects did not look compromised and were comparable to Hollywood standards. Ranbir's conviction in the deva deva song when playing the VFX-induced fireballs is excellent. I especially enjoyed the car chase scene where Isha is driving a BMW while trying not to get killed by the third killer (Zor or Rafthar?) The background score also keeps you interested in the high moments of the story.
The movie lacked big crowd-pleasing moments. If only Rajamouli had suggested a few defining scenes, it would have uplifted the cinema. These moments occurred when the Scientist (SRK) was on the screen for his short cameo. SRK naming his killers while wearing his Astra is a great scene.
The ending of the movie was not convincing to many. Expecting people to believe that love is the greatest power of all without making them feel love was the biggest mistake Ayan committed. I am invested in the story's potential and want to see Part 2: Dev when it comes out in a few years.
It was also great to see the advance booking registers clocking the most significant numbers of the year and the movie making a great start to the weekend at the box office. I do hope it recovers the money and makes more for them to want to continue with the trilogy with great enthusiasm.