There’s a lot of debate about Kalki 2898 AD: is it original or derivative? Is it great, bad, or strictly okay? And – unlike the simplistic political worldviews of the other pan-India blockbusters from the South – did it mean to be more complicated?

We’ll be the first to admit: Kalki 2898 AD, the sci-fi dystopian film directed by Nag Ashwin, doesn't deserve to be prematurely mocked. Well, at least not a lot. Kalki 2898 AD is an ambitious, high-budget, multilingual sci-fi fantasy inspired by Hindu mythology. The one thing Kalki shares with the other high-budget pan-India movies – like Baahubali (also starring Prabhas), RRR, or Brahmastra – is ambition. The biggest departure? Intent. In the recent spate of pan-India films, all the attention was on employing visual effects to drive heroic arcs, ending in the protagonists’ self-actualization and not so much to explore larger socio-political dynamics, save for passing references. Kalki, made on a comparable scale, uses its visual effects to different ends.

Perhaps the true spiritual predecessor to Kalki is Anji, which was the most expensive Telugu film ever when it was released in 2004. It drew on the lore of the pantheon of Hindu gods and deployed visual effects-led fantasy as the medium to ask the question: what do divine powers feel like, and what are the moral consequences of acquiring them? No, not even “megastars” like Chiranjeevi should acquire them, because humans who seek power are fallible. At the time, Anji’s visual effects ambitions were too expensive to make it a commercial hit. But years later, the films that “made it” skewed the other way ideologically: Baahubali tells the story of a divinely gifted strongman, RRR is about two brothers-in-arms who turn into demigods, Brahmastra is about a man realizing he is a demigod. All these übermensch narratives assume that the premise that good vanquishing evil is largely an interpersonal conflict between powerful forces. The special effects are only meant to show off how cool the good guys look.

Kalki picks up where Anji left off – it uses grand visual techniques as a tool to scrutinize society. It asks the bigger question: what if good and evil was never such a straightforward binary? A montage shows the progression of societal collapse: from the Nazis, to environmental destruction, to the mass enslavement and capture of women. We end up in a totalitarian state in the future, led by a self-proclaimed god-man whose reign of terror keeps the elite satiated with all manner of sensate luxuries and the have-nots in a barren wasteland outside the “Complex,” fighting for scraps. The Ganga is dried up, the Earth is bereft of greenery, everything is doomed. Women’s wombs are harvested for the Supreme Leader’s benefit, in accordance with a prophecy about a divine baby named Kalki.

This is textbook fascism, and the choice to deploy sci-fi arguably speaks to the dangers of rapidly accelerating techno-fascism all over the world. As an audience primed to expect bad visual effects from Indian movies, this film surprised everyone with its good visual effects. There is then only the film itself to grapple with, and the purpose that such high-end visual effects serve to convey what society’s descent into hell feels like. The steampunk, futuristic yet overwhelmingly gloomy and oppressive city is keenly realized because of the director Nag Ashwin’s effort to realistically construct a lot of it with the help of the Mahindras, who provided the infrastructure and tech to build some vehicles and set pieces from scratch (a purist approach that is lauded when it’s Denis Villeneuve or Chris Nolan who subscribe to it).

Despite its star-studded ensemble cast, this narrative emphasis towards the visual – conceptualized with a socio-political purpose, rather than for the sake of it (read: RRR’s animal fights or Baahubali’s random CGI ship) – is a shift away from the pan-India tradition of muscles, brawn, and hypermasculine pageantry. Which isn’t to say that those things don’t exist in this film – they do, in several tiresome fight sequences. But the larger questions that this film raises isn’t about the imagination of filmmaking; it’s about the imagination of film interpretation and, more pertinently, what film critics’ frames of reference are. And more importantly, why is Kalki viewed as spectacle first, political second (if at all)?

It was this post by film writer Sagar Tetali that first asked the broader question: why are we eager to uphold the notion that the default for some kinds of Indian filmmaking is derivative and not sincere? The confusion over how to interpret Kalki 2898 AD is over the question of intentionality: did the filmmaker intend to be politically critical, or not? Was the film inspired by Hollywood sci-fi staples like Dune, Mad Max, and the Blade Runner films films, or was it a cheap copy? All this signifies a bigger problem with how we interpret cinema in India: to whom do we ascribe intentionality and intelligence?

There has been a long-standing tendency to analyze “South” cinema as pure spectacle, and Hindi cinema as carrying intellectual heft. This was especially true of the 2010s, when Hindi cinema was in its “multiplex” era. There were the exotic European buddy-comedies (ZNMD, Dil Dhadakne Do), the gritty and dark indie-action films (Gangs of Wasseypur), the epic period romances (Ram Leela, Bajirao Mastani), the rise of black comedy (Andhadhun, Newton), “women-led” crime-thrillers (NH10, Kahaani), to name just a few. They were sophisticated pathbreakers, and the filmmakers were interpreted as intentional geniuses who took creative risks to push cinema as a whole. Many became cultural flashpoints for reviewers and audiences alike to talk feminism and agency. Some became subtle yet deft commentaries on elite culture. And still others were opportunities to critically analyze aesthetics and cinematic craftsmanship.

In contrast, the “mass” cues and sensibilities, the star worship, loud song and dance, and choreographed action in “South” cinema rendered them unworthy of so much close-reading in English-language mainstream media. They were scarcely, in the mainstream, read as “pastiche,” “meta-narratives,” or “political commentaries.” Few attempts were made to engage with aesthetics and ideological subtexts in the context of local socio-cultural and political realities. The explicit and implicit connections with caste politics, and even how caste creeps into the aesthetic and storytelling choices in Telugu films, were left to the domain of academics. Where an outsider to the Southern states might see only “rugged” class politics, a local audience-member or a keenly observant academic would see the obvious caste implications. Accordingly, any analysis of these films remained confined to slotting them into the simplistic categories of “entertainers,” “masala flicks,” or “action-romps.”

It was only when Telugu films crossed over into the national mainstream that there was any attempt to scrutinize the intentionality of their messaging, beyond just the spectacle. And it’s true that the messaging hasn’t been great lately. Animal, directed by Sandeep Vanga Reddy, was the epitome of dominant-caste Reddy pride and hypermasculinity, unleashed upon the rest of the country with a vengeance to prove itself important. That, coupled with the other Rajamouli fantasy flicks that leaned into Hindu nationalism, in order to capitalize on the political moment rather than question it, inevitably invited accusations of intentional misogyny and jingoism, and rightfully so.

But what about when the messaging isn’t so clear-cut, possibly even more complex? That’s Kalki, which, in the absence of an overwhelmingly “bad” characteristic like misogyny or hypernationalism, once again falls into the category of a film that must only be analyzed as pure spectacle. And in that, it is perceived as shamelessly copying Hollywood and, if it is even a little politically prescient or aesthetically original, is unintentionally so.

In a serious analysis of a film with such a mammoth budget, however, Prabhas’ or Saswata Chatterjee’s characters might be self-aware, not laughable tropes; the dizzying array of cameos might be camp, not cheaply executed fan service. The AI-assistant might be a genre homage, not formulaic. Critics might also miss the long tradition of meta-referencing in Telugu films, which is the basis of the conversation between Prabhas’ Bhairava, and the cameo by S.S. Rajamouli, who appears as another bounty-hunter and says it’s been a while since they (the characters, and also the real life actor-director duo) collaborated. These fourth-wall breaking moments are dismissed as fan service (unlike with, say, Om Shanti Om where the cameos are a meta-commentary on Bollywood). But fan service is the lifeblood of Telugu cinema, an industry that is as political as it is commercial because of its fans’ devotion and social groupings transcending mere appreciation. And just like The Matrix cannot be interpreted without the text “Simulation and Simulacra” by Jean Baudrillard, in Kalki, we hear references to the Bhagavad Gita in two key moments: one comedic, one climactic. How might such a religiously-loaded choice influence the social vision of this world and the one that the film inhabits?

The marriage of sci-fi dystopia with mythological narratives arguably carries forward the Telugu industry’s own experiments with high-tech to tell old stories. It is the future grappling with the past: hence the themes on the power of prophecies, the ill-founded quest for immortality, and the endeavors to fight corruption and absolute power at the top. And yet, despite the history of Telugu cinema’s old, well-established tryst with fantasy (well before Anji with Jagadheeku Veerudu Atiloka Sundari or Mayabazaar), reviews have pointed to the film’s aesthetic similarities to Blade Runner, Guardians of the Galaxy, Dune, Mad Max, and more, and have concluded that these similarities make the film derivative.

It prompts a follow-up question about the default assumptions about Hollywood: what makes Dune original in its aesthetics, and not a copy of Mad Max? What makes Star Wars original, and not itself a rip-off of Dune? The grace ascribed to mainstream interpretations of a film’s intentionality – homage, not a copy; inspired, not derivative; intertextual, not an imitation – is scarcely afforded to “regional” film industries, despite the insistence that there’s no such thing as “regional” anymore.

If anything, Kalki makes a strong case for retaining the cultural specificities of “regional” cinema. Anji might have been a dud 2004, but it was a time before pan-Indian multiplex moviegoers could accuse it of being unimaginative. Kalki 2898 AD builds on that imagination – and for all its (many) faults, maybe it’s the high-brow mainstream that just doesn’t get it.