Enthiran (The Robot) Review

Hello friends,
First of all thanks for reading my blog. Here in this blog, I am going to write about Enthiran. Please share your thoughts after reading.

Enthiran is a mind boggling movie. It is the talk of the nation for the past one week not here in US but at least in India. All the media folks are talking about Enthrian. I am so impressed by seeing hundreds of posts on the internet about this movie. Some websites even have specials, hot topic “Rajinikanth” “Enthiran”, “Robot”. I think the reason is, it is the first Indian Sci-Fi movie with the combination of a great team at work. Big players, Rajni, Shankar, A.R Rahman, Kalanidhi Maran and Stan Winston Studios all worked together to bring us this masterpiece. What a combination!!!!! It may not happen again. Shankar is a very good story teller and he has done a great job. Kudos to Shankar for directing this movie; Kudos to Rajni for his marvelous performance, Kudos to Kalanidhi Maran and to A.R. Rahman too for his melodious compositions. It is going to be India's biggest blockbuster movie ever made. Now coming to Rajni, Rajni, Rajni and Rajni. Rajni rocked on the screen. His dialogue delivery was awe-inspiring and his creepy laughter reminded me of some of his old movies. His body language coupled with his creepy laughter, and sneer facial expressions were stupendous. Over all, the fourth character that Rajni (villain robot character) performed was outstanding. I don't know how many people realized that there were 4 different characters played by Rajni in this movie. Anyway, that is how I see it, four kinds of roles, once again special kudos to him for his performance.

For those who don’t get enough of the movie (like me) by just watching it once or twice, I tried to narrate the story in the following three paragraphs. But for those who haven’t watched it yet, and plan on doing it this weekend or so and want to hold up to the suspense, just skip the following three paragraphs.

The story goes like this: Dr. Vaseegaran (Rajni) a scientist invents a robot Chitti (humanoid who looks just like Rajni), which has been a 10 year dream project for him. Sana (Aishwarya Rai-Bachan) lover girl of Vasi gets disappointed because Vasi’s focus is always on work and he hardly finds time to spend with her. When Sana realizes that Vasi invented Chitti, she gets excited and takes Chitti with her for a couple of days. Chitti helps her when she gets into trouble. Despite being a Robot, Chitti inadvertently gets human emotions and falls in love with Sana. Sana rejects Chitti's love, stating that Chitti is not human and cannot possess the emotions of a real person.

Meanwhile Vasi is trying to seek approval from the Indian Army for Chitti to be used as a soldier in place of real humans. He suggests using it as an unmanned robotic soldier at the border. But, Prof. Bohra (Danny Denzongpa) disapproves it stating that Chitti might be harmful to Indian Army itself as he would lack the capacity to discriminate between friends and foes while at a combat. Given this denial, Vasi decides to infuse human emotions into Chitti.

Dr. Vasi takes Chitti to AIRD again to get approval. But Chitti disappoints Vasi by telling his love about his girl friend in font of the chamber, and Chitti doesn’t prove his talent before the council. He again gets rejected by Indian Army, and this drives Dr. Vasi crazy, who then chops Chitti’s arms and legs and dumps him. Learning the fate of Chitti, Bohra starts on a search for Chitti, who escapes from his inventor’s mutilation and joins hands with Bohra agreeing to give its neural schema. Bohra then updates Chitti with additional programming which gives rise to the evil Chitti with destruction capabilities. He kidnaps Sana on her wedding day and tries to impress her. With his new powers, he creates hundreds of Chittis as his subordinates to assist him in his fight with his master, Vasi. At the end after a long fight Dr. Vasi will re-program Chitti and bring him back to way he originally created him.

A couple of scenes could have been avoided like everyone says, but if you look at the overall audience I think that also makes sense; especially the last 30 minutes, which made me sit at the edge.

I have watched this movie twice in the theatre in the Portland Metro Area. Albeit a little expensive, I thoroughly enjoyed both the times. The first time, I enjoyed the movie shooting confetti for every scene that Rajni appeared in a different character. I was a little quieter the second time, and actually enjoyed watching the movie quietly. The movie is still playing in theaters. I think it is the first Indian movie running more than a week with ticket price as jacked up as this was (FYI, the first time I bought the ticket @ $40 a piece). I wish I could go and watch the movie third time but got strict orders from my home minister not to spend anymore on it, as we have already spent over $150.

As outrageous as the ticket prices were, I still think the movie was worth every penny we spent on it. I felt that some distributions were just plain greedy, but no complaints, as they might have also paid high prices to buy the film. So finally, my advice to all those who haven’t seen the movie yet, please do so, it was worth the talk and the time.

Coincidentally, a couple of days ago, I was listening to “Talk of the Nation” and I heard a discussion regarding the following: Can Unmanned Robots Follow the Laws of War. I wish I called Neal CONAN and said, hey, Neal the answer to your question is in Enthiran, go watch it.
Can Unmanned Robots Follow The Laws Of War?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130329148