Dheera.. Mag­a­d­heera

There are only 2 cat­e­gories of cin­ema — Good and Bad. Every small story is told or writ­ten for some­body else to lis­ten or read. One inter­est­ing genre of films, is a grand fan­tasy based movies and the visu­als they offer are mem­o­rable for life­time. I can bet that those who have seen these movies in big screen agree to remem­ber­ing the great visu­als from films like ..McKenna’s gold, Ben hur, Cliffhanger, True Lies, Juras­sic park, Titanic.. to name some in Tamil.. Kar­nan, Aayi­rathil oru­van [ MGR ], Indian, Thiruda Thiruda. The great­est enabling tool in mod­ern day story telling is com­puter graph­ics, which entered Tamil cin­ema in the early 90s [ leav­ing ‘Raja chinna rojavodu’ song :) ]. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s used as a com­i­cal ele­ments and not car­ried away with the story. [ exclud­ing films like Amman and excep­tions like Eeram ].

We might have heard the sto­ries start­ing with ‘Once upon a time, in ghora king­dom..’ Sind­bad kind of adven­tur­ous sto­ries. But we had the lim­ited oppor­tu­ni­ties to watch them in some other lan­guages and not in our native style [ at least in the recent past ].

 Out of all the Indian movies which used CG, I would say ‘Mag­a­d­heera’ is the sin­gle movie which explored the best pos­si­ble lim­its of CG to enable nar­ra­tion [ not to just woo the audi­ence ]. I wouldn’t pre­fer Shankar movies in this cat­e­gory as they were used mainly for songs. I am fas­ci­nated to know that I never came across these Tel­ugu tech­ni­cians and still I found the best n tech­ni­cally extrav­a­gant entertainer.

Story

The fan­tasy tale hap­pens in 2 dif­fer­ent peri­ods — one in 1609 BC and the other in 2009. Other than this part, the story has the Stone Age char­ac­ters of a hero, hero­ine, vil­lain and a love. It’s not the story but the nar­ra­tion which makes this story brilliant.

View

I won­der how the direc­tor might have nar­rated the story and visu­alised this fan­tasy tale. Of course, it’s the expe­ri­ence of Chi­ran­jveei to accept the con­tent [ involved in dis­cus­sion ] and the tal­ent of the crew. The credit goes fully to SSRa­jamouli and his sup­portve pro­ducer Chiranjeevi.

Rarely, the direc­tor gets the right n tal­ented crew to con­vert the scenes from paper to screen. This film has got the best tal­ent and makes all the aspects very inter­est­ing. You name  any­thing right from the cos­tumes, sets [ Bhairavakona,  Shiva ], color, period stunts, horse chas­ing, exotic loca­tions [ salt lands in Dholavira ! ] and splen­did effects.

More than the film, I liked the way the script has been cat­e­go­rized. A mini flash­back, action, intro song, hero­ine intro, lighter scenes, song, vil­lain intro, love igni­tion, song, hero meets vil­lain, action and inter­mis­sion. This was class and has been exe­cuted at its best. One of the finest inter­mis­sion sequence, where the audi­ence are asked to get ready for the big part of the story [ like the inter­vals of Baasha, Indian, Johnny Gad­dar ].  There are many sequences to explore grandeur of hero­ism [ ” Bairavve Gelusthaadu” with glo­ri­uos BGM :) ] and metic­u­lously planned ideas through­out the film.

It’s life­time film for Ram Cha­ran Teja [ Chiranjeevi’s son ] and he has uti­lized it at his best [ got a bet­ter voice ]. Sec­ondly, the hero­ine Kajal Agar­wal [ Pun­jabi princess ! ]  - In the first half, she looks unsuit­able and her cast­ing as beau­ti­ful princess is jus­ti­fied in the later part of the film. More than the actors, it’s the crew which has done their best of their pro­fes­sional abil­i­ties. the entire credit goes to SSRa­jamouli and his best picked team. Story writer Vijaen­draprasda, M.M.Keeravani [ MD ], Senthilku­mar KK [ Pho­tog­ra­phy ], KVRao [ Edi­tor ], cos­tume designer, Peter Heynes [ Stunts ] and of course, art direc­tor Ravin­der [ yes ! he same waster tech­ni­cian of Aayi­rathil oru­van — See his best in Magadheera ].

The songs are very usual except Dheera dheera song [ beau­ti­fully sung by Nikitha Nigam and MMKeer­a­vani  ].But the back­ground score was extra­or­di­nary and very apt for a film like this. You know.. the MD MMKeer­a­vani is bet­ter known as Mara­gadha mani in Tamil film indus­try [ remem­ber Kam­ban­gaadu .. MD of Azha­gan, Vaaname ellai ! ]. I love his other song from the movie ‘Sye’ . Just try.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQQ9slNIWMQ .

One line about the visual and sound effects.. Effects were never explored in such a mag­ni­tude in Indian movies, before. The good part is that you don’t real­ize any of the above said views, when you watch the film. We can ignore some of the cliches used and they were tol­er­a­ble [ Vil­lain say­ing ’ If I like, I’ll get it oth­er­wise I’ll kill it’ :) ]. No won­der this pic­ture cre­ated numer­ous records in Tel­ugu cinema.

The finest anti­dote to my ‘Aayi­rathil Oru­van’ experience.

–Toto.

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