2.O, Shankar and his 'Vision'

I loved the title sequences. It has been long since I had a seen a full 3D film that 2.0 was working for me very well. As long as the novelty of the visuals lasted, what I was seeing on screen was 'escapist' fun.

But my social media exposure, I realised was slowly spoiling the film for me. I was being assured that I knew the story already and the biggest intended surprise that Akshay Kumar's character, the Shankar's version of Salim Ali, was the antagonist/protagonist. But the film arrives at this point only at the interval.

And the second half has a very ordinary flashback but the story's core looked very honest that Pakshirajan's (Akshay Kumar) untimely death did feel a bit tragic. And soon the film shifts to the much publicised final 'stadium' showdown and all trademark imagination of Shankar is let loose.

When the end credits started rolling, it felt nice to have passed more than a couple of hours really well and I thought I would recommend the film to families in my neighborhood. A large portion of the first half had made good use of the 3D device, as a result of which even normal scenes looked fun. The possessed Vaseegaran- Chitti conflict on the road was also very well imagined, reminding me of my favourite Anniyan climax.

But nearly an hour after the film ended, I tried to recall something special to write about the film and to my surprise, there was nothing at all to be found. The 500 crore budget and the three year heavy technical stuff, I realised, had failed totally to leave any deep impressions on me, which was not quite an unfair expectation when you talk about Shankar's films.

Shankar, over his 25 year old career, has made just 11 films. The amount of technical effort that goes into the making is often said to explain the very long gestation period of every film of his. He is often said to be a great imaginator, Tamilnadu's version of say, a James Cameron. But if you try to do a very cursory analysis of his oeuvre, you may find that the magnificence of his imagination has always been restricted to the film's song-and-dance portions. Otherwise, the intense impact his movies have left upon us are solely because of the core strength of his stories and the efficiency of his screenplays. Shankar's films can easily be called 'political' films, working very much within the masala format, as a result of which these films must not be analysed very 'seriously'. His films, if anything are the reel equivalents of our much beloved pulp stories, which do have a strong emotional-political core, though the solutions they offer to the 'political' problem need not necessarily be practicable.

To simplify, we need to acknowledge that Shankar stays in our minds mainly because he has made genuine films on contemporary political issues and these issues, in turn, have served well as robust engines to propel the racy thrillers which he had always wanted to make, at the end of the day. And only as adjuncts to this masala-thriller construct, the so called 'Shankar Imagination' products have served and much of them can be spotted only among his totally disparate, yet exotic song-and-dance sequences.

Endhiran was the first and only film where his 'imagination' neatly dovetailed into the story's premise and as a result of which the film, for all its flaws, looked very much like one of a piece. No sequence could be recalled without sensing the technical wizardry involved in its realisation and this is how, as a film buff I want Shankar's work to be remembered.

But strangely, the same cannot be said of 2.0. Though there is so much CG work involved in every scene, none of the 'wizardry' is impactful to be remembered even though the scale of the film is almost three times that of its predecessor.

Shankar's inability to write crisp and flavorful scenes that might serve as a proper scaffolding for the visual effects to stand and speak for themselves, is so evident throughout the film. Even for situations that sound so juicy and are innately exciting, much of them borrowed from the first film, Shankar struggles to ground them properly and hence none of them manage to create the desired impact. To give an example, when Chitti is ordered by Vaseegaran to be upgraded to the rogue 2.0 version, I expected the scene to explode with long bottled up energy brimming with naughty nostalgia. But nothing other than ARR's music works during the scene and Rajni is left all alone to fend for himself, when actually he is expected to be sashaying through his predatory duties, having gotten morphed into his favorite beast avatar.

All this could be attributed, in retrospect, to Shankar's failure to find a proper writer post the demise of his long time associate, Sujatha Rangarajan. I now find myself more comfortable to contend that only Sujatha was supplying ammunition to Shankar's tanks and hence his campaigns before and after the legendary writer's death differ so much in terms of intensity and achievement. One may be reminded of how bloated and exhausting, Vikram's I was, even if the cast and the crew were in top form.

I have been seeing reviews of 2.0 with some of our Tamils thumping their chests for having surpassed the Telugu speaking Bahubali franchise, in terms of imagination and accomplishment.

To illustrate the indispensability of Amarendra Bahubali to the existence of Magilmadhi kingdom, even if the king was the powerful and menacing Balvaldevan, Rajamouli conjured up a magnificent, largely dialogue-less sequence at the interval block. As one of my friends described it, that sequence at exactly the half way mark of the film felt very much like the peak, a roller coaster is supposed to touch, where the rider can no longer help feeling dizzied and breathless. I am wondering how many reams of paper Shankar would have needed to illustrate the same scenario, had he been sentenced to direct a timeless magnum opus like Bahubali, which a high net worth 2.0 is nowhere near.