Come to think of it, the average commercial Hollywood
movie is only as good as any Indian movie. Same old
good versus bad stuff, with the bad guy wanting to
kill everyone else except his gang of baddies, the
hero wanting to save the society and his girlfriend
(who always has a knack of getting into trouble) etc.
A lot of fights and a climax which inevitably has
the hero triumphing. That is about it in a nutshell.
The way of making and the scale of the entire affair
is an altogether different thing. Here, the hero wants
to save the people in his street, his hamlet or his
village at best. But, in mainstream Hollywood movies
it is more often an entire city that the hero has
to save (probably New York) and in some cases it is
the entire world. Here, the villain deals in petty
drugs, kidnapping, guns etc… In Hollywood, it
is more of nuclear weapons, bombs in skyscrapers submarines,
time travel and hi-fi things like that. And, if Indian
cinema has fights in shipyards, construction sites,
godowns, markets and deserts, Hollywood takes it to
the next level by going for locations like the wing
of a moving aeroplane, the top of Empire state building,
the deck of an oil tanker etc….
Really, is there anything different? Yes, there are
no songs in English movies. That apart, Indian and
Hollywood commercial cinema is more or less the same,
only the packaging is different. Yet, Indian cinema
always gets branded as the one that takes ‘cinematic’
liberties, makes superheroes out of men and fools
out of audiences. Hollywood cinema is the more intelligent,
believable kind of stuff!
Is it really so? Or does Hollywood have a perfectly
foolproof knack of making us overlook everything that
is unbelievable in their movies, allowing them to
pack in all kinds of over the top stuff without being
labeled as cinematic. The answer is yes. You have
to give it to Hollywood. They know how to present
the most illogical, dumbfounding and impossible things
on earth and get away with it looking extremely intelligent
and of course a lot richer.
Watching X Men over the weekend confirmed this thought.
You had everything that 100 commercial Tamil movies
put together could not offer – flying submarines
(made possible by the sheer will of a man –
one of the heroes), missiles hanging in mid air without
knowing which way to go, people who can change shape
and form as and when they like (this was not a Harry
Potter film), flame throwers etc. And, the audience
was clapping, I too enjoyed it, no one talked about
logic. Not just X Men, almost every Hollywood action
movie has these typical stunts. Every Spiderman sequel,
Batman etc... you can keep counting. Of course, there
are other very well made movies too; we are not talking
about them.
When Rajnikanth swiveled his right foot to cause a
mini cyclone underneath in Chandramukhi it evoked
sniggers and many subsequent movies made comedy scenes
based on this. Cut to The Last Airbender, a bald 13
year old boy was creating storms from his palm, aided
by stylishly choreographed Kung Fu moves – audience
clapped – no one demanded logic – because
it was fantasy.
So, what is it about Hollywood movies? They have a
fairly simple agenda, to entertain, to present a spectacle
on screen that will make you forget everything else.
That is pretty similar to what Indian movies want
to do. But, Hollywood does its homework better. Yes,
they create the better excuses for presenting all
the impossible things on earth – mutated men,
extraterrestrials, superheroes bitten by spiders,
creatures from the portal of hell, second world war
radiation victim turned zombies etc…. And hey,
they no longer have to worry about any kind of logic
– the hero can fly, walk upside down, blast
through walls, cut down swords, stop aeroplanes with
his fist and anything that the director wants and
CGU finds possible.
It is in this department that Indian cinema falls
short. Indian filmmakers just don’t know how
to find excuses that will lead them around the necessity
to think about logic. Why can’t we have good
enough excuses? We have a rich enough history, lots
of myths, the Himalayas which are known to have all
kinds of powerful herbs, poisonous snakes etc.. Get
a hero to eat one of these herbs, or a snake to bite
him, or invoke some hidden power locked up by some
magician in the 15th century (can be shown in an animated
flashback) and the director will no longer have to
break his head over the lack of logic in his scripts.
Yes, the Indian film makers are waking up to the necessity
of finding good excuses to make great action films.
That is why we had Enthiran where Shankar used the
Robot excuse to make Rajnikanth do all things impossible,
but that was not good enough, people still demanded
logic. Now, there is Ra One which again will try offering
us an excuse to make Shah Rukh Khan fly and make cars
fly, we’ll see how good that one is.
With money and technology no longer a barrier, it
is just a question of finding good enough excuses
for Indian cinema to make action flicks that are as
good as Hollywood. We have started, we will get there,
till then we will have to make do with the Hollywood
excuses!
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