A man has a simple and pure desire to build
an army of robot soldiers bearing his likeness but somehow people and emotions
and mosquitoes inevitably stand in the way. This perhaps comes close to
describing the runaway shopping cart of a premise belonging to 2010's Enthiran,
a Bollywood musical homage (sort of) to Isaac Asimov. Asimov is name checked
several times in one of musical numbers, anyway. This movie is a lot of fun,
for the most part exhibiting a sequence of events heedless of formula or genre
conventions. The climax of the film goes the wrong way but for all the
silliness and weird logic the characters are genuinely engaging.
Bollywood legend Rajinikanth plays both the
robot's creator, Dr. Vaseekaran, and the robot, Chitti.
Rajinikanth has been a star since the 70s
and incredibly for this physically intensive role he was 61 years old when the
movie was released. In addition of course to dancing the movie features several
quite amazing action sequences.
This is from a scene on a trolley where
Chitti saves Sana
(Aishwarya Rai) from a gang rape. It's hard not to think of the widely publicised
real life incident where a woman was gang raped on a trolley in Inda in
2012--two years after Enthiran was released. But of course
it wasn't a crime without precedent. I felt here the film was attempting to
reaffirm a social conscience by showing how a hero ought to act.
The movie, which had been pure romantic
comedy with some cartoonish slapstick up to this point, may jar Western viewers
with the abrupt shift in the seriousness of subject matter. Well, you ain't
seen nothing yet.
Vaseekaran takes Chitti to a military board
of review hoping to sell the brass on manufacturing thousands of Chittis to
replace India's
human army. But the nefarious Dr. Bohra, Vaseekaran's mentor who sits on the
committee, has been trying to develop his own robots to sell to the highest
international bidders. He undermines Vaseekaran's demonstration by showing
Chitti will stab Vaseekaran if ordered to. For some reason, instead of figuring
the robot needs to be programmed with better recognition protocols, everyone
figures this means Chitti needs to be given human emotions. This is reinforced
when Chitti rescues several people from a burning building but rescues a woman
from her bathtub, carrying her out to the waiting crowd without thinking to
cover her nakedness. She immediately commits suicide by jumping in front of a
bus and bizarrely everyone counts it as a murder perpetrated by Chitti.
Vaseekaran works day and night to give
Chitti human emotion but has no success until Chitti is struck by lightning. I
suspect this was meant to mollify some of the more conservative individuals in
the audience.
Chitti proves his newfound sentience by
delivering a baby which greatly impresses Sana,
Vaseekaran's fiancée. Unfortunately, Chitti falls hopelessly in love with Sana. In my favourite
scene, Chitti watches her sleeping at night from her window but rushes in when
he sees a mosquito on her cheek. She wakes up, shocked to find him there. After
he explains why he entered her room, he asks her to kiss him on the cheek like
she did after he finished delivering the baby. She tells him that she kissed
him before because he accomplished something great so he asks what he needs to
accomplish in order to receive another kiss. She tells him to catch the
mosquito.
Chitti pursues the insect to a community of
mosquitoes and proceeds to have a dialogue with them. He
demands they hand over the offending mosquito, they demand he provide them with
AB blood and petition the government to make the mosquito the national bird. In
a movie that keeps finding new left fields to pitch from this was the turn I
absolutely adored. It's played without a trace of irony, it's just pure fairy
tale which, for all the sci fi trappings, is really what the whole movie is.
Vaseekaran and Chitti enter a bitter
rivalry for Sana's affections, presenting her
with jewellery and dance numbers, until finally a confrontation takes place where
Sana explains
to a tearful Chitti that love between human and robot is impossible and not
just because of the lack of a penis which Chitti alludes to and his inability
to impregnate her. Sana
tells him it's something that can't be put in words.
A surprisingly horrific scene follows after
which there is the film's most curiously irrelevant musical number which brings
Vaseekaran and Sana
to what appears to be an Aztec temple.
The last act of the film features the
misguided decision to put Chitti under the influence of an evil red chip. He
slaughters hundreds of people and there is a really impressive car chase
sequence as well as some of the film's most impressive musical numbers.
All of this is to veer away from the
morally ambiguous direction the movie was heading in. Which is too bad.
Personally, I think Sana
would have been better off with the robot.
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