Ramayana review: Yash's Ravana steals a stunning epic

Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana opens in Lanka rather than Ayodhya, and it is a telling choice. Ravana (Yash) gets a backstory, a grievance, a fierce devotion to Shiva and ten heads reimagined as rival selves bickering inside his skull. Rama (Ranbir Kapoor), when he finally arrives, gets a halo. Over three hours of film, and this is only Part 1, that imbalance ends up mattering more than any of the spectacle.

The story needs no introduction. Rama strings the bow, wins Sita (Sai Pallavi), loses the throne to the scheming of Kaikeyi (Lara Dutta) and walks into exile with Sita and his brother Lakshman (Ravie Dubey). The film stops at Sita’s abduction, with Hanuman saved for a post-credits glimpse.

And the spectacle is something. The trailers drew jokes about looking like a video game, and the film does look like one, but it commits so completely to its glowing, heightened world that the style reads as a choice rather than a compromise. The war between devas and asuras that opens the film, the gold-drenched skyline of Lanka and Ravana’s mid-air duel with Jatayu (voiced by Anupam Kher) are on a scale Indian cinema hasn’t attempted before. Most of it is seamless. A few forest scenes give the game away, with the exiled trio looking faintly pasted onto their backdrops, the perspective a few degrees off. That is a small fraction of the film. The rest is the money, all of it, on the screen.

Yash is the reason it holds together. His Ravana swaggers, sulks and prays with equal conviction, and the film perks up every time it cuts back to Lanka. Ravie Dubey’s Lakshman, hot-headed and wry, gets the laughs and most of the human moments. Ranbir Kapoor and Sai Pallavi are harder to warm to. Both are dignified, and this Sita gets a sword and some spirit, but the weight of playing gods seems to have frozen them into careful poses. Their romance has little spark, which hurts in a story whose engine is a man losing his wife.

The screenplay, co-written with Shridhar Raghavan, is reverent to a fault. Exile, a father’s collapse, a stepmother’s betrayal: the plot keeps throwing things at Rama, and he absorbs each one with the same serene face. A little licence, one moment of doubt or anger, might have turned an icon into a person. Without it, the runtime is felt, especially in an opening hour that plays like a parade of introductions.

A.R. Rahman and Hans Zimmer’s background score does much of the emotional heavy lifting and is rousing in the battles, though the songs fade the moment they end. The 3D is subtle enough to be optional. The big screen is not. This belongs with 300, Troy and Avatar, films you watch for the size of them, and waiting for streaming would miss the point.

Ramayana knows exactly how a god should look. Part 2 needs to work out how one should feel.