Ra.One: Not the Number One!

By Avantika Sharma

An undying spirit, a staunch belief and a hi-tech family drama is what closely describes both, the recently released Ra-One and its maker Shah Rukh Khan. The first 20 minutes of this film are from being watchable with anything narrowly synonymous with the word ‘family’.

Although the maker has made tremendous effort to portray equation and emotions shared between a 21^st century, New York born and bred son and a south Indian NRI father who is anything but a hero for his child.

One sees obvious reflections of the star’s personal life relation with his son Aryan to whom he has dedicated the film to at every press conference in the last few months.

The beginning of the film may also be mistaken for a video game instead of a Bollywood film with one of its most sought after romantic heroes. Although the detail in characterization is quite interesting specially when we see Shah Rukh eat a Chinese dish like noodles along with curd using his hands instead of a fork or chopsticks. But, the screenplay lacks smoothness, emotional strength, and originality in both the content and its treatment as certain sequences seem lifted as they were in super hero flicks such as Iron Man, Bat Man and Spider Man.

Although the background score of the film is quite appropriate and has been mixed quite well, most of the songs like ‘chamak challo’ and ‘criminal’ stick out like sore thumbs, not taking the story forward. At the same time one cannot deny the fact that the track ‘chamak challo’ is topping the charts, as an independent entity, because of the novelty in the composition and treatment by American R&B artist, rapper and songwriter Akon. The music is loud and it is pretty hard for an average Indian to catch the lyrics of most songs leaving aside ‘Dildara’.

The VFX department of Redchillies Ent. Pvt. Ltd. has made a tall claim of having worked on more shots than the Hollywood hit ‘Avatar’ as far as the computer generated images go. One does salute the effort and the experiment made by an indigenous company but much cannot be improved when content lacks logic in most places and the film’s target audience is lost in the use of multiple languages, to cover which most dialogues seem repetitive, where they are first spoken in English and then in Hindi. It is unfortunate that even after the response of ‘KITES’ the makers of Ra one did not learn much.

The cinematography and lighting, especially of the funeral sequence, has lived upto the expectation. Costume designers, production designers and song directors / choreographers, all seem to have done their job quite well. Perhaps, Kareena Kapoor has looked her best in this film after the successful ‘Jab We Met’, thanks to her immaculate make up and hair do’s.

The film is worth a 70 rupees ticket for an average Indian and not more.

Avantika Sharma is a trained film maker who has assisted the likes of Dr. Manmohan Singh in several Hindi and Punjabi Films and Television Commercials. She can be contacted at avantika.films@gmail.com