Ramayana: Rise of a Legend review – India’s most expensive film ever becomes spectacular, huge-scale epic

Based on the ancient classical poem about Rama, the avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, this three-hour blockbuster is highly enjoyable Here is a thoroughly engaging, rousing and spectacular Indian epic melodrama from director Nitesh Tiwari, with music by Hans Zimmer and AR Rahman, b

Based on the ancient classical poem about Rama, the avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, this three-hour blockbuster is highly enjoyable Here is a thoroughly engaging, rousing and spectacular Indian epic melodrama from director Nitesh Tiwari, with music by Hans Zimmer and AR Rahman, based on the ancient classical poem about Rama, the avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. It has often been adapted for live-action and animated movies in the past, though surely not on this scale, the current three-hour blockbuster being only the first half. (There are no musical numbers though.) The idea of aristocrats submitting stoically and yet playfully to exile in the forest has something Shakespearean about it, and if you are suffering from Homer-withdrawal after Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey , a story about the noble Prince Rama finally vowing to wage war on a distant city where his wife has been abducted might just fit the bill.

Ranbir Kapoor plays the mythical Rama, a noble warrior and statesman who has been brought into being in the city state of Ayodhya as a bodily representative of Vishnu, and from the first his sense of destiny is overwhelming. But what exactly is that destiny? In broad terms, his fate is to face off with Ravana (Naveen “Yash” Kumar), king of far-off Lanka, a figure whose former slave status once triggered in him such a cosmically intense prayer for justice that Lord Brahma offered him the superpower of athletic strength and indifference to pain.

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