A triumph of maximalism like an album by Queen, or a buffet at a restaurant where everything is good, Kalki 2898 A.D. is a lot. Ironically making its debut as we read again and again about how starved for new films audiences are, this Tollywood behemoth feels as if it’s determined to fill in all the gaps a moviegoer might be missing. Writer-director Nag Ashwin is casting the net wide with this new cinematic universe, using the sacred Hindu text of the Mahābhārata as a foundation for a sci-fi/fantasy/action epic that spans six millennia and makes a point of scratching every possible itch you could want.
Ashwin and his creative team do a great job of incorporating countless influences into a traditional adventure structure without ever feeling overly derivative of any one work. This is a film that can incorporate Cloud Atlas and Flash Gordon with equal elegance, finding the common ground between Children of Men and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, or reconcile several Star Warses at the same time. There’s an infectious love of the movies — all movies — to be found here, with a nimble production design (from Tumbbad’s Nitin Zihani Choudhary) that understands Blade Runner, Enki Bilal, Madonna’s “Bedtime Story” video and Moebius all share common threads.
To put it another way, after the opening battle at the end of the Kurukshetra War that lays out the operating parameters for the next three hours, there’s an animated sequence that covers 6,000 years of human behavior and pins you to your seat with a kind of dazzling sadness; you have to reach back to Pink Floyd — The Wall to find a similar fusion of reach and regret. And though my frames of reference are predominantly Western, know that Kalki 2898 A.D. has a grasp that extends to all manner of global culture.
When pan-Indian star Prabhas (if you haven’t seen the Baahubali films, please remedy that) shows up as our antihero Bhairava, he does so by going half Falstaff, half Han Solo. (But as last year’s Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani taught us, the hairstyle that says "ultimately noble ruffian" is Prince’s Graffiti Bridge coiffure.) He also has bad impulses with money and an AI supercar named Bujji, as well as a dream of one day finding a place inside the utopian-on-the-outside/dystopian-on-the-inside Complex, an inverted pyramid that balances above the city of Kaṣi like Leviathan in Hellbound: Hellraiser II.
Are there issues? Yes. Fortunately (?), we’ve been trained by Marvel films and the streaming age not to expect a concrete conclusion to things, so that one doesn’t wound as much. It’s a shame this isn’t getting to unfurl in 3D anywhere locally, because it would absolutely flourish in such a presentation. And there are some moments that get a little sweaty in transition. But all of these are bearable when we are given a moment like when a prophecy is fulfilled, and instead of conveying the magnitude of the moment with an effects sequence or something of that nature, we see the joy of a group of women, and it’s like nothing you’ve quite experienced before in a film that aims to give you all the experiences. Bring on Part II; I’ll be right there.
