Ra.One

This film traps its audience in a dark and claustrophobic world

Point-of-view is the key to cinema as a brand. The writer and director of Ra.One has chosen a London school kid as his perspective on this story of a geek in the gaming department of ‘Barron Industries’ who creates ‘Ra.One’. The son of this geek, mop-haired Prateek Subramanium (Armaan Verma) thinks it is really cool when his absent-minded Tamil Brahmin father, Shekhar (Shah Rukh Khan), generates a super-villain as winner.

Soon, the artificial intelligence of the game turns to outlandish reality and we have Ra.One (Raavan) and G.One (Jeevan) battling it out, first in London and then in Mumbai. All through, the kid is the centre of gravity, and even the babe, Sonia (Kareena Kapoor), is just a gyrating ‘Wo.One’ married to a robotic G.One (Shah Rukh).

Mind you, Sonia starts off as a ‘respectable’ professional, doing research on ‘ma-behen’ curse words in Hindi and suggesting, in her thesis, that the words should be converted to ‘baap-bhai gaalis’ instead. This is intended as a pop culture joke on the puerile nature of academic work. This is the feminist nonsense that people do at university in London (nudge-nudge) instead of spending their time more productively at Bollywood, dancing.  

But backfire time is close at hand. The ideology of the film, such as it is, comes in a kiddie package, and since it is presented from the standpoint of ‘Lucifer’, Prateek’s video game identity, we never really exit from it. The audience is trapped inside the game, and the slice-of-life ambience that we need to make us feel we are in a movie with flesh and blood people, is sorely missing.

It is a dark and claustrophobic world in Ra.One and the makers clearly think that this is the way to reinvent a Bollywood superhero—turn him from a stuttering charmer to a wind-up mechanical toy.

About The Author

Ajit Duara