Enthiran (Dir. Shankar, *ing Rajnikanth, Aishwarya Rai)
Dec 17, 2015 2:11:00 GMT
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Post by odadune on Dec 17, 2015 2:11:00 GMT
I'd been meaning to put up reviews of this and Anniyan and maybe Sivaji: the Boss ever since watching Shankar's I earlier this year, but hearing that they finally locked down a villain for Endhiran 2 and had the muharat shot today kind of prodded me into action. 
Enthiran (also transliterated Endhiran, and called Robot for the Hindi and Telugu dubs) is the story of a well-meaning scientist (Rajnikanth) who builds a super-powerful android named Chitti who looks just like him (Rajnikanth), neglecting his med student girlfriend (Aishwarya Rai) in the process. The scientist tries to train Chitti up as a superhero, lets the girlfriend befriend him in the process, decides that Chitti needs to have human emotions so that he can understand human behavior better, and ends up losing control of Chitti to an evil scientist played by Danny Dezongpa, who finds out the hard way that disabling the morality programming in a super-powerful android doesn't necessarily make him your friend....
All the Shankar films I have seen are...different, but Enthiran is in some ways the most different. It was an immensely ambitious science fiction film, with the robot designs being done by Stan Winston Studios in Hollywood, and the most impressive special effects that India had seen up til that time. It was also extremely successful all over India; Shahrukh's Ra.One was basically an Enthiran wannabe, complete with a cameo by Rajnikanth in Chitti mode. It takes a lot to reduce SRK to playing follow the leader, even briefly, you know what I mean?
The first two thirds of Enthiran is an old-fashioned sentient-robot/Frankenstein drama in many ways, only with a Tamil sensibility. I found the combination of the comfortingly familiar SF/horror tropes I grew up with combined with a different cultural perspective to be pretty interesting, although it has some problematic content I will get to in a minute. Rajnikanth is solid as the scientist and rather better than that as the robot; I had first seen him in Sivaji (from the same director) and come away with the impression that there was a good actor hiding under all those mannerisms, and Enthiran went some way towards showing me the actor behind the superstar. Aish looks fabulous and rocks a variety of outrageous outfits (including some anime girl getups in one of the songs), but is not that convincing as a flighty and sometimes self-centered young woman (which is more surprising because she did perfectly fine as a flighty self-centered young woman in Action Replayy, made around the same time). Danny Dezongpa does well with what he is given, but like Upen Patel and some of the other baddies in Shankar's I, he gets a little lost in all the sound and fury and general weirdness. The scientist's romance with the heroine is pretty weak, with the age gap between Rajnikanth and Aish being off-putting (he was in his late fifties at the time of filming, and she was in her mid/late thirties). It's less bothersome when Chitti gets emotions and falls for the girl, because Chitti's apparent age is more ambiguous (due to him looking and being artificial) and because this subplot is played fairly chastely.
The problematic content-aside from some random sexism related to the romantic triangle-mostly relates to two sequences. One where Chitti saves a conservative woman in a bathtub from a burning building, sets her down in front of the media, and she panics, runs off and gets hit by a truck. This is the trigger for the scientist deciding to program Chitti with emotions so he can understand humans better. Alot of people seem to interpret this as "the film says Chitti shouldn't even have rescued her", but to me this always seems like the film saying he should have been more sensitive to her reactions, and gotten her a bedsheet or something, let her off some place discreet, etc. What I personally find objectionable about it is that it's an unpleasant, disturbing scene with a black-comic, vaguely satirical edge, and this isn't the kind of film that's earned the right to go there. The other problematic sequence is a setpiece where Chitti rescues the heroine from a group of rapists on a train. Again, there's an element of grim social commentary-this was one of the first mainstream Indian films to depict sleazoids trying to record their crimes on cell-phones-in a film that hasn't really earned the right to go there, and it's all mixed up with some genuinely impressive cgi action scenes as Chitti reaches the train, gets onboard, and kicks butt, and with the horrifying, protracted buildup of Aish being threatened and manhandled. Intellectually speaking, there should be no difference between seeing Aish or another actress having to go through this scene, but for me at least there was something peculiarly horrifying about seeing the super-glamorous lady I had watched in my very first Indian film (Kandukondain) and my very first Hindi film (Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam) go through this.
The film's reputation really rests on the surreal third act, where Chitti builds five billion identical versions of himself and tries to take over the world, and the scientist has to impersonate one of the Chitti units in order to reprogram his creation and save the girl (but not before the five billion Chittis combine to form a giant robo-snake) and also on some memorable song picturizations sprinkled throughout the movie. The first picturization is between the scientist and the heroine, and is awkward and boring, although the song and Aish are both very pretty:
But then we get this:
and this, sometimes considered problematic for its treatment of Native American cultures :
(Before you ask, yes that is Macchu Picchu in the background).
and finally this:
Unlike Anniyan and I, which also use horror/suspense/quasi-fantasy tropes but manage to appeal to people who aren't necessarily interested in that, alot of Enthiran appeals mostly to people like me, who watched a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation growing up and thought the android Data was one of the most interesting characters on the show. It's maybe worth seeing in the Hindi dub (Robot), for which dvds and blu rays are usually easier to find, if you are already interested in Rajnikanth or Aish, or have caught glimpses of the epic fight scenes and want to see them (or the ARRahman songs) in their proper context. Let me leave you with a low quality youtube version of Enthiran's finest moment, the action packed climax:
Enthiran (also transliterated Endhiran, and called Robot for the Hindi and Telugu dubs) is the story of a well-meaning scientist (Rajnikanth) who builds a super-powerful android named Chitti who looks just like him (Rajnikanth), neglecting his med student girlfriend (Aishwarya Rai) in the process. The scientist tries to train Chitti up as a superhero, lets the girlfriend befriend him in the process, decides that Chitti needs to have human emotions so that he can understand human behavior better, and ends up losing control of Chitti to an evil scientist played by Danny Dezongpa, who finds out the hard way that disabling the morality programming in a super-powerful android doesn't necessarily make him your friend....
All the Shankar films I have seen are...different, but Enthiran is in some ways the most different. It was an immensely ambitious science fiction film, with the robot designs being done by Stan Winston Studios in Hollywood, and the most impressive special effects that India had seen up til that time. It was also extremely successful all over India; Shahrukh's Ra.One was basically an Enthiran wannabe, complete with a cameo by Rajnikanth in Chitti mode. It takes a lot to reduce SRK to playing follow the leader, even briefly, you know what I mean?
The first two thirds of Enthiran is an old-fashioned sentient-robot/Frankenstein drama in many ways, only with a Tamil sensibility. I found the combination of the comfortingly familiar SF/horror tropes I grew up with combined with a different cultural perspective to be pretty interesting, although it has some problematic content I will get to in a minute. Rajnikanth is solid as the scientist and rather better than that as the robot; I had first seen him in Sivaji (from the same director) and come away with the impression that there was a good actor hiding under all those mannerisms, and Enthiran went some way towards showing me the actor behind the superstar. Aish looks fabulous and rocks a variety of outrageous outfits (including some anime girl getups in one of the songs), but is not that convincing as a flighty and sometimes self-centered young woman (which is more surprising because she did perfectly fine as a flighty self-centered young woman in Action Replayy, made around the same time). Danny Dezongpa does well with what he is given, but like Upen Patel and some of the other baddies in Shankar's I, he gets a little lost in all the sound and fury and general weirdness. The scientist's romance with the heroine is pretty weak, with the age gap between Rajnikanth and Aish being off-putting (he was in his late fifties at the time of filming, and she was in her mid/late thirties). It's less bothersome when Chitti gets emotions and falls for the girl, because Chitti's apparent age is more ambiguous (due to him looking and being artificial) and because this subplot is played fairly chastely.
The problematic content-aside from some random sexism related to the romantic triangle-mostly relates to two sequences. One where Chitti saves a conservative woman in a bathtub from a burning building, sets her down in front of the media, and she panics, runs off and gets hit by a truck. This is the trigger for the scientist deciding to program Chitti with emotions so he can understand humans better. Alot of people seem to interpret this as "the film says Chitti shouldn't even have rescued her", but to me this always seems like the film saying he should have been more sensitive to her reactions, and gotten her a bedsheet or something, let her off some place discreet, etc. What I personally find objectionable about it is that it's an unpleasant, disturbing scene with a black-comic, vaguely satirical edge, and this isn't the kind of film that's earned the right to go there. The other problematic sequence is a setpiece where Chitti rescues the heroine from a group of rapists on a train. Again, there's an element of grim social commentary-this was one of the first mainstream Indian films to depict sleazoids trying to record their crimes on cell-phones-in a film that hasn't really earned the right to go there, and it's all mixed up with some genuinely impressive cgi action scenes as Chitti reaches the train, gets onboard, and kicks butt, and with the horrifying, protracted buildup of Aish being threatened and manhandled. Intellectually speaking, there should be no difference between seeing Aish or another actress having to go through this scene, but for me at least there was something peculiarly horrifying about seeing the super-glamorous lady I had watched in my very first Indian film (Kandukondain) and my very first Hindi film (Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam) go through this.
The film's reputation really rests on the surreal third act, where Chitti builds five billion identical versions of himself and tries to take over the world, and the scientist has to impersonate one of the Chitti units in order to reprogram his creation and save the girl (but not before the five billion Chittis combine to form a giant robo-snake) and also on some memorable song picturizations sprinkled throughout the movie. The first picturization is between the scientist and the heroine, and is awkward and boring, although the song and Aish are both very pretty:
But then we get this:
and this, sometimes considered problematic for its treatment of Native American cultures :
(Before you ask, yes that is Macchu Picchu in the background).
and finally this:
Unlike Anniyan and I, which also use horror/suspense/quasi-fantasy tropes but manage to appeal to people who aren't necessarily interested in that, alot of Enthiran appeals mostly to people like me, who watched a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation growing up and thought the android Data was one of the most interesting characters on the show. It's maybe worth seeing in the Hindi dub (Robot), for which dvds and blu rays are usually easier to find, if you are already interested in Rajnikanth or Aish, or have caught glimpses of the epic fight scenes and want to see them (or the ARRahman songs) in their proper context. Let me leave you with a low quality youtube version of Enthiran's finest moment, the action packed climax:
Since Sept. 6, 2022, Chiloka has not been reachable. (