“Baahubali!”
The name rings out like music. Maybe you’ve heard it before, or maybe you haven’t, but the song sounds sweet just the same. S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali is back: sliced, diced, and repackaged as a single film. A two-part box office behemoth in India —The Conclusion remains the second highest-grossing Indian film of all-time — Baahubali has become something of a cult item in the States. “I got this Blu-ray imported,” one might overhear in the breakroom at work. “Have you heard of it? Baahubali?” The American evangelists are few, and they’re a careful bunch; one never knows how something like Baahubali will be received by a general American audience. But with Baahubali: The Epic, the evangelists stand vindicated — it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Baahubali can play in front of any audience, anytime, anywhere in the world, and still resonate as one of the greatest screen spectacles yet made. One can only hope its release ascends the cult to worldwide dominance.
When George Lucas said he hoped to be remembered as one of the pioneers of digital cinema rather than “the maker of some of those esoteric twentieth-century science fiction movies,” Baahubali might have been the future he was looking toward. Rajamouli weaves digital imagination with hard-won practical filmmaking while still imbuing it with an eccentric character all his own: computer-generated vistas sprawl without end; canted angles cut into whip-sharp zooms which cut into slow-motion hero shots; batshit images surface, clearly conceived for nothing more than the love of the game, and are kept relentlessly aligned with the world they’re intended to build. No moment feels misplaced, no flourish feels awkward.
The war sequences in Baahubali, for example, earn their company with the very best in cinema history; their scope and confidence put them neck-and-neck with the likes of Braveheart and Lawrence of Arabia. Gigantic capes fly over phalanxes of soldiers, only to be ignited on top of them in order to burn them alive; scythes affixed to chariots run through crowds of enemies like a hot knife in butter; men are impaled on swords that have jagged edges near the hilt, evidently crafted for that very purpose. There’s enormous ingenuity in the dispatching of bodies in Baahubali: the action is exciting, but more importantly it’s coherent — we follow projectiles, we telescope in and out to understand battles’ geographies, and we get a sense of human scale in close quarters.
Baahubali’s story is just as hallucinatory as its style, and it’s a swirl of legendary inspirations: David and Goliath, Jacob and Esau, Moses, Hamlet, the Mahabharata, and classic Indian comic books. It begins and ends with Mahendra Baahubali, the rightful leader of the kingdom of Mahishmati, but The Epic is an intergenerational narrative and spends most of its time with Mahendra’s father, Amarendra, who’s duking it out with his brother Bhallaladeva for control of Mahishmati. The political intrigue throws a spear directly into the heart of the laborious halls-of-power chess matches plaguing prestige TV: the sibling rivalry is replete with scintillating arguments before the court and crafty challenges, but it’s rooted in the sincerity of leading man Prabhas, the Wayne to Rajamouli’s Ford. Fulfilling double duty here as both Amarendra and Mahendra Baahubali, he’s larger than life — exuding a superstar aura that shames the American system for failing to meet it.
In fact, there are a lot of qualities on full, rich display in Baahubali: The Epic that Hollywood can’t seem to marshal anymore. It has a bright, smooth sweep; its men are chivalrous and its women are strong; and its romance unfolds with an uninhibited adolescent joy. It beams with a Disneyness that Disney has forgotten, and asserts that it isn’t a crime to use movies like The Lion King, Tarzan, and Mulan as points of departure, leaving all other blockbusters looking puny in its wake because it adapts the Renaissance’s time-tested principles for the 21st century. If Ne Zha 2 teased it — it robs the original Baahubali duology blind — The Epic confirms it: the blockbuster will survive well into the future, just not in the hands of the American filmmaker. Blockbusters have a greater fate: to burn brightly for the rest of the world.
There is no end to the superlatives one can shower on Baahubali: it’s baroque, brawny, and beautiful; it explodes with visionary ebullience; it’ll make you 10 years younger and shave 18% off your car payment. The Epic does, however, have an Achilles’ heel. Even for the first-time viewer, it’s easy to see that much of Baahubali has been surrendered in order to accommodate the unwieldy container of a single four-hour cut. Subplots are reduced to montage and expedient voiceover, numerous scenes are clearly shaved within an inch of their integrity, and major characters — including Mahendra Baahubali — get short shrift in order to move the story along. After a while, it gives one the impression of watching Baahubali’s Greatest Hits, Rajamouli himself mashing fast-forward on the remote in order to get the good stuff. Yet to spend four uninterrupted hours in its world with a crowd voracious for its manifold delights is worth any sacrifice. The Epic is unlikely to become the definitive version of the Baahubali story, but it is without a doubt the theatrical experience of the year.
DIRECTOR: S.S. Rajamouli; CAST: Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Anushka Shetty, Ramya Krishnan, Nassar; DISTRIBUTOR: Variance Films; IN THEATERS: October 31; RUNTIME: 3 hr. 58 min.
Comments are closed.