I want my Rs.160 back! (or why I hate Dasavatharam so much)
I cant’ believe I traveled over 20 miles by auto, boarded the metro and walked the marshy reeking Delhi roads to watch Kamal Hassan’s latest movie - Dasavatharam. I spent 160 bucks ($4, quite high according to Indian standards) just to get a front row ticket. All along, I was expecting that the movie would kickass thereby making all those efforts seem worthwhile. But No! It was a total let down. The first shot opens up with a poorly orchestrated “zoom out” effect and the following shots and graphics were equally un-professional. The make up is disastrous, I don’t know if the production crew tried to low ball the make up artists but it sure looks like, in my opinion, the make up crew deliberately decided to take revenge or they were just plain lazy.
When will we ever get to see industry standard CGI in Indian cinema? The graphics are really bad and I wonder why they had to hand over the graphics job to people in the US when such low quality work could’ve been done in some corner street photoshop with a pirated version of Maya. For God sakes this is not a crappy pappy 8th grade science project where a baking soda volcano would suffice but an “epic movie” on a budget of 140 crore. If you can’t do something good then please don’t do it. The movie would’ve been much better without them.
Now on to the story, or should I say, the lack of any story. The whole story is basically spun around this concept of 10 avatars or roles. I think one fine day Kamal Hassan woke up and thought, “Hey wouldn’t it be marvelous if I played 10 different roles in a single movie? That should definitely be a world record or something!” and he decided to pen down a story around that dream. Hence we don’t find any strong storyline or compelling dialogs but just campy one liners like “Hey pal, do you want more holes in your girlfriend?”, haha! that was classic. To make it even more epic I think someone suggested somehow to link the 2004 Tsunami to the story.
Finally, we are left wondering which roles were useless and which ones really did matter. I personally bought down the number to 3, the hero, the villain (aka Mr.Fletcher) and possibly Mr.Naidu(for comic relief). By the end of the movie, I looked beside and saw my Mom, who is a die hard Kamal Hassan fan, happily sleeping. She later said it was possibly one of Kamal’s worst movies.
Overall, the movie is horrendous and makes you lose faith in Tamil movies. If Kamal Hassan has come down to such a level after movies like Hey Ram, Indian and Anbe Sivam, then I guess, there is no light at end of the tunnel for Tamil cinema after all. I wish I had an extra thumb so I could give it 3 THUMBS DOWN!!!!
