Endhiran, My First Movie Review

A movie review, my first one. I haven’t written any reviews so far. Probably, I wanted to start with one of my favorite films. Although I liked the movie, Endhiran is not one of my favorite films, but it starred my favorite actor. Rajini is my favorite because of many reasons. There may be many actors, who are more dedicated to acting, who put more efforts than he does, and who might probably, with a very small chance, in some situations, better emote than he does, but none of them posses that thing more than he does, the thing that makes him special:  panache. I simply love watching him on screen. He needn’t put efforts to act. Acting comes naturally to Rajini. I love his dialogue delivery, his humility, his ability to handle attention, and the list goes on.

To give a background on what Rajini craze is, see this video which was shot in America, a place where less crazier Rajinikanth fans can be found ;-)

You might have known that Endhiran’s crew consists of people who worked in films that set benchmarks for special effects. I am talking about films like Jurassic Park and The Matrix. But most probably, you never knew that Rajini presented the robot in my college, SSN college of Engineering. ;-)

Spoilers ahead. The film is a sci-fi where a scientist, Dr. Vaseegaran(Rajinikanth), from Carnegie Mellon University designs a powerful android, which he later names Chitti(Rajinikanth, again). The film revolves around the effects when such a powerful android is upgraded to feel and to think for its own good. Dr. Vaseegaran, after ten years of hardwork, designs an android, Chitti, that is devoid of human emotions. Chitti is not built according to Asimov’s rule, meaning it can kill and attack humans. Vaseegaran designs it that way because he intends it to be dedicated to the Indian Army. When he presents that Robot, it receives positive acclaim and earns the jealousy of his guide Dr. Bohra, the head of INRD, the organization that has the power to approve bots to be used for military purposes. In the evaluation, Bohra gives commands to Chitti and orders it to kill Dr. Vaseegaran. It obliges, and after stopping it from an impending murder, Dr. Bohra rejects Chitti on the grounds that it doesn’t know human values and can be misdirected to kill Indian commanders and army men. Frustrated and annoyed, Rajini tries hard and later succeeds in incorporating human feelings to Chitti. The result: Chitti falls in love with Sana(Aishwarya Rai), Vaseegaran’s girlfriend. Chitti starts hitting on Sana, and an annoyed Vaseegaran orders Chitti to stop it. Chitti disagrees with Vaseegaran and in the fight, Vaseegaran destroys Chitti. Dr. Bohra, who had already agreed with terrorists for supplying bots, learns about this, and decides to use Chitti. He finds Chitti in one of Chennai’s garbage heap and rebuilds it. Additionally, he inserts a “red-chip”, which has the necessary instructions and data for Chitti to behave maliciously, making it suitable for terrorist activities. Chitti, which is capable of thinking for itself, disobeys bohra and heads for Sana. The climax is about how Vaseegaran saves Sana and stops Chitti.

The first half is technically sound. I was able to appreciate a lot of technical consistencies. One of the incidents is when Bohra’s robot, which is not as much sophisticated as Chitti, recognizes the word ‘gun’ as ‘bun’, and picks up a “bun” when ordered to pick up a gun. In the initial phases, when Chitti starts to learn, Shanker has made up many jokes with Chitti’s inability to identify contexts. It is all cool, something that you can’t find in recent tamil cinemas easily. With lackadaisically taken Tamil films where people even go to the level of typing into media players, even though Shanker took the film, I was afraid that the film might have technically stupid scenes. You can be assured that there won’t be such scenes. Speaking of displays of computer processes, I have a special note for my friend Arun Balachandran, who once was a knowledge engineer: there is a scene in the film where Rajini’s screen displays “updating ontologies” :D.  The scene where Chitti operates is amazing. I felt so excited for that scene, and I thought probably the music had created all that feeling. First half ended up with that operating scene followed by the note that Chitti has started to fall in love with Sana. Almost all my friends, when they came out during the interval, had a look which said, “worth the $20″ :)  The first half made the viewers to have lots of expectations to which second half didn’t live up to. Nevertheless, the second half was good.

If there is one scene which I would not have forgiven if not for Rajini, then it is the scene where Rajini goes out to catch the mosquito which bit Sana. I couldn’t tolerate Rajini and Aishwarya talking with mosquitoes. It was the first scene in second half and I felt let down. This scene somehow reminded me of the scene in Shanker’s Anniyan where roses hung their heads down seeing Sadha. If somehow Shanker rids himself out of such scenes, I would like Shanker’s film more. The supposed villain Dr. Bohra turns out to  be dummy piece in the second half. When his terrorist affiliations where shown, I was a little upset that the concept of terrorists trying to acquire robots was repeated to death. I am glad that they didn’t build on that. In the second half, after Chitti starts thinking, Bohra rebuilds Chitti with maliciousness using the same underlying neural schema. I was happy when Chitti mocks at Dr. Bohra when asked to obey his orders. It would have been naive if Chitti had obeyed Bohra. I once again felt that the character of the robot was technically consistent. During the end, the special effects were mind blowing, first of the kind in Indian cinema. I loved the scene where many robots make a formation of a human who leans on the building and gestures, “I am cool and you can’t do anything”. I felt the robot said, “I am Chitti”, something like, “I am Neo” :D. As many of them felt, the climax ended abruptly. Although one can give technical explanations for what had happened in the climax, it would have been good if Shanker had given it.

Nevertheless, there were lot of laudable things in the film, and it is a MUST watch film. When budding wannabe superstars cant stand a scene where they would get hit, the fact that Dr. Vaseegaran never uttered a single masala punch is laudable. However, I loved it when Chitti says, “No one can destroy me”. It reminded me of “Shivajiyum naan dhaan, MGRum naan than”.  A small caution for Rajini fans: I believe Rajini was mainly cast in the film for assuring return on investment. I felt it was a Shanker’s film, not a Rajini’s one. But of course, you will enjoy watching Rajini on screen as I, a hardcore Rajini fan, did [dot].

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