‘Brahmastra’ - When insecurity overtakes spectacle and spectacle overtakes emotion

At the outset, let me say that I enjoyed Brahmastra and I'd recommend it to everyone. I was rooting for it to work, to draw people back to cinemas, to prove that 'boycotts' are ineffective, to add much needed firepower to India's visual effects infrastructure, to have a big spending Hindi film make money so that small but unconventional films, the kind I'd like to make, get room to exist.

But my primary reason for wanting Brahmastra to work was something I'll come to later.

From here on, I write not just as a viewer enthralled by the movies but also as a new filmmaker, who is learning each day. Brahmastra has become among the fastest, if not the fastest, Hindi film to cross 100 Crores domestically and post much greater numbers internationally. Hopefully it'll not only recover all its money but earn healthy profits that will help Parts 2 and 3 come to life.

Which brings me to the primary reason I wanted Brahmastra to work. Brahmastra is the realisation of Director Ayan Mukerji's decade-long vision.

When a filmmaker starts his career with 'Wake Up Sid' and later spends ten long, tumultuous years on one vision, l as a filmmaker root for him.

Brahmastra is a rare spectacle, it has never-before-seen CGI in Hindi cinema, it is commendable that such a vision was imagined by Ayan and sanctioned by Karan Johar.

Having said that, as risky as the vision was, perhaps to overcompensate for it, the film seems to have been written with a lot of insecurity. And hence I can't remember one second in the film that didn't feature background music, that wasn't telling me exactly what to feel. I craved for silences, for 'moments' that weren't plot points but just small, mundane things I'd take back home in my heart. I was spoon-fed dialogues that a child would deem as over-explanation. Characters were brought in and chucked aside for fun.

You root for a character to get superpowers, when the character is being punished without fault, when they're underdogs, castaways. Here, we're told the protagonist is miserable yet he gets what he wants when he wants and has supposedly attained nirvana before the film begins. But instead of universally understood problems that you could root for, we're told he has a problem that we do not understand and hence we're given oodles of information. The world felt so elaborate yet never necessary or comprehensible. Fantasy superhero movies work best when they have a soul, when they're simple to feel. But the occasional romantic moment aside, Brahmastra never had me caring for anyone, it only had me waiting for the next bit of visual trickery. The spectacle overtook the emotion. I was never bored yet never on the edge, never consumed, never destroyed.

Somewhere buried deep within were the seeds of a moving story. A story that could shed light on the differences between a father and mother, a child outgrowing his parents, the loneliness of a child growing alone, the double-edged sword that is sacrifice, the life-shaping relevance of a great teacher...

I only hope that after the film's resounding success, the makers feel safe and secure enough to now bring the story in the foreground, to wrap its trickery around a soul and ascend from a movie that earned unprecedented money in wobbly times to a movie that earns unprecedented love and ownership from its audience!