Ra.One: Hollywood clone or Indian superhero?

By Jai Arjun Singh There was a time when the term “Bollywood superhero movie” was a tautology. When a leading man already had powers well beyond mortal imagination, where was the sense in dressing him in tights or a metallic suit and arming him with death rays and spider webs? In recent years, with films like Krrish and Drona, Bollywood has more fully embraced the caped-crusader archetype. But watching the Ra.One trailers — so evocative of Hollywood superhero and fantasy films — and reading about the huge budget and the cutting-edge effects, I can’t help wonder: is this truly the birth of a bona fide Indian superhero? My own first glimpse of an Indian movie-star made up to look like a Western superhero was through the “Adventures of Amitabh Bachchan” comics. Published in the early 1980s, this series cast the superstar in a double role — as “himself” and as his crime-fighting alter-ego Supremo. Supremo had no special powers but that didn’t stop him from wearing a tight pink suit with a purple sarong tied around his waist (wisely, the people who thought up the series decided against Superman-style undies) and the obligatory aviator goggles to protect his identity. He travelled by helicopter, solved mysteries with his young assistants Vijay and Anthony (obvious references to two of Amitabh’s best-known screen aliases) and hung out on an island populated by wild animals. [caption id=“attachment_115627” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Shah Rukh Khan and Kareena Kapoor at the music launch of Ra.One. Raju Shelar/Firstpost”]  [/caption] To eight-year-old eyes, all this was supremo-cool. Hindi cinema itself made very few excursions into sci-fi/fantasy at the time, though there were dream sequences like the one with Govinda and Kimi Katkar dressed up as Superman and Spiderwoman (or was it the other way around?). The best such film was the hugely popular Mr India. It had an invisible hero and a variant on the Superman-Lois Lane story: a feisty reporter falls in love with Mr India without realising who he really is. But apart from a couple of neatly staged scenes like the one where the villains are seemingly knocked out by a Hanuman statue, there was nothing especially high-tech about this film. That promise briefly came to life with the other signpost superhero movie of my youth — the Arabian Nights fantasy, Ajooba, in which Bachchan played a buffoon named Ali who doubled up as the dashing eponymous masked hero. Today, Ajooba is viewed as a film that was always meant to be high camp, and which therefore fulfilled its own ambitions perfectly. Its cult following rests on scenes like the one where Amitabh interrupts a conversation with a dolphin to tell an old woman, “Yeh machli meri ma hai”. (Now there’s a superpower for you!) But I remember the long build-up and the tall pre-release claims made for it in magazines. It was supposed to bring new standards of technical excellence to Hindi cinema. When we finally saw it on that The Friday afternoon, it was a disappointment. Even to an impressionable 13-year-old, the metallic monster that showed up in the climax was little more than a walking scrap heap, the back-projection for the flying carpets was amateurish, and even the sight of a miniaturised Rishi Kapoor gyrating inside Sonam’s blouse offered small compensation. None of it could compare with the seamless, almost poetic special effects in the most high-profile Hollywood movies like Terminator 2. Twenty years on, it’s safe to predict that the action scenes in Ra.One will match those of any contemporary Hollywood film. It is part of a new generation of big-budget movies that are competing with an ever more sophisticated gaming universe — one that today’s kids are so familiar with that most regular action films look unimpressive to them. The Ra.One look — or what little has been revealed of it so far — reminds me of a much-repeated Shekhar Kapur prediction from 2005: “[In a decade], when Spider Man takes off his mask in Asia, he will probably be either Chinese, or Indian. And he will no longer swing from the high-rise buildings in New York, but from Shanghai or Mumbai.” The point was to extol the rising global clout of both the Asian market and an Asian-influenced hybrid pop culture. Continued on the next page But now that Ra.One is here, here’s a counter-question: actors aside, will there be anything identifiably Indian about this film? One shot in the trailer has Arjun Rampal (playing the titular villain) emerging from a fiery background that takes the shape of the ten-headed Ravana. But apart from this token reference to Indian mythology, the bad guy’s look seems mostly derived from films like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (and, doubtless, video-game villains of whom I know nothing). The first time we saw special effects of this quality in an Indian movie was in the 2010 Rajinikanth-starrer Robot/Enthiran. In its spectacular (and spectacularly overlong) climactic sequence, hundreds of evil robots arrange themselves into menacing shapes, swallowing cars and helicopters whole. But even this CGI-fest never lost sight of Rajinikanth’s chief fan base — the adoring audience to whom he was a superhero even when he was playing a taxi-driver. The creators of Enthiran made sure the movie had its cheesy mass-audience moments too; the hapless heroine rescued from leering, moustached goons, and even a tacky little animated-mosquito interlude that played like a Kachua-Chaap ad. In any case the film’s eventual hero was not the high-tech robot but the nerdish professor with no superpowers (except for the important detail that he was played by you-know-who). For all his superhuman powers, the audience went wild not when Rajini outran a train but when he did what he’s always done best: toss off one of his trademark lines of dialogue. Back in Mumbai, as we keep hearing these days, “retro” is all the rage. Salman Khan — Shah Rukh’s major rival within Bollywood — has had a line of box-office successes with Wanted, Dabangg and Bodyguard — movies that are celebrated for reviving the dhishum dhishum cinema of the 1980s (and that older and more old-fashioned definition of a “superhero”). Compared to the cheerful mass appeal of these films, it’s likely that Ra.One’s audience will be more niche: mainly the urban, multiplex-going youngsters. And it will no doubt score high on the global market (which is just as well, given the costs it needs to recur). But will it be a true pan-Indian success like Robot or Dabangg? Of course, Shah Rukh and his financiers have done their best to make it so. Though I haven’t followed Ra.One — related gossip too closely, one of the last things I heard was that Rajinikanth had been brought in for a cameo appearance as well as for his “blessings”. This sounds as good a move as any. If only they could have thrown in a brief animated sequence with Supremo on his island and Ajooba’s dolphin-mom whistling in the distance, we would have that rare thing: an ultra-slick gaming blockbuster that a small-town kid today could relate to. My nostalgic inner child of the 80s would approve as well.