I went into the theatre really eager to like Brahmastra. It’s the labour of love by a director I adore, stars two peerless actors who should have been cast together much sooner, and promises a spectacle unlike any other seen by Indian audiences thus far. And yet, I left the movie hall disappointed.
Sure, Brahmastra is a spectacle of staggering scale. The visual effects are impressive. But not engulfing enough for you to not notice the acute lack of substance. It’s a fantastic idea on paper — the making of the Astraverse, a supernatural, hidden world deeply rooted in Indian mythology. It’s about time we got our own superheroes dueling it out and saving the world. I get why Ayan Mukerji gladly gave 11 years of his life to bring this vision — his magnum opus — to fruition. If only he’d spent some amount of this time on building a screenplay and characters that weren’t as threadbare and wooden as they are.
Supernatural fantasy sagas are almost always driven by plot and elaborate events rather than characters but if you intend to convince your audience that love is the greatest power of all, then the least you need to get right is, well, the underlying, all-encompassing emotion that forms its core. This is where Brahmastra goes horribly wrong.
It has arguably the worst, most ridiculous build-up to falling in love ever conceived on film. What’s wrong with it, you ask? That it doesn’t exist. Poor orphaned boy, who is a DJ (Ranbir Kapoor), sees a rich London-returned girl and falls head over heels for her in a heartbeat. The girl Isha (Alia Bhatt), for some inexplicable reason, reciprocates. In their second meeting, she declares that if he is Shiva, she is Parvati and tags along with him to Varanasi to support him in a ludicrous adventure she knows nothing about, just that it can get them both killed. This unearthly selflessness after he abandons her on the night they meet. Wow.
We are never told anything about Isha. Her affluence and London are alluded to in the beginning not to be mentioned again. As for her family, we meet two of her cousins and once her grandfather in an utterly needless moment. What do they think about her suddenly taking to a stranger, vanishing for long periods of time, and returning with shocking bruises? We never find out. Isha exists solely to make our hero aware of who he really is and what’s his life’s true purpose. Also, nothing — no matter how bizarre or unearthly — surprises her. She is a muggle but behaves as if she were Hermoine.
This undercooked, rushed treatment of falling in love is disheartening coming from Mukerji, whose previous two films, Wake Up Sid (2009) and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (2013), are masterclasses in how to show on-screen familiarity bloom into fondness. Love in both these films is deliciously layered, detailed, carefully spread out, and almost entirely incidental. Their romantic leads arrive at the big realisation after having spent the entire film trying to navigate the maze that is life. Brahmastra starts with it. And not intelligently like Gully Boy (2019) in which the boy and the girl are already together and it's left to the viewer to conjure up a meet-cute as they wish.
Brahmastra’s part one is in a terrible hurry to show you all that it’s got, and there is a whole lot, way too many tricks up its sleeve. But in its haste, it makes the blunder of gliding through its core without giving it the time, the thought, and the attention it deserves. The result is a soulless story that harps about love but has no heart.
Take for instance Shiv’s DJing, his two friends, or the orphaned kids he lives with. In one scene, Shiv is willing to cut short his first meeting with Isha —the love of his life — to reach on time for one of the children’s birthdays. Such is his devotion toward them. But after that brief introduction, the children, the friends, and the cousins, all vanish without a trace. The film treats them as trivialities that it dispenses with as soon as it can.
The screenplay is so underwritten, disjointed, and the dialogues so clunky, that they make even actors as terrific as Bhatt, Kapoor, and Amitabh Bachchan appear wooden. All the people in Brahmastra have so much to do that they have no time to be. I want to say that Kapoor and Bhatt’s on-screen chemistry is as dreamy and crackling as all their fans have been expecting it to be, but it isn’t. Although I did enjoy seeing them together. But it has to do more with the wait and the hype than anything else.
Brahmastra: Part One—Shiva has a lot of Harry Potter in it and cleverly invokes familiar nostalgia. There’s a lovely cameo by Shah Rukh Khan — his third this year after Rocketry: The Nambi Effect and Laal Singh Chaddha. He plays the Vanarastra, with the powers of the great divine monkey. Nagarjuna is the Nandiastra, with the strength of a hundred raging bulls. But his role is so short, that it will leave you wanting more. Mouni Roy, as Junoon, the representative of the king of negative forces Brahma Dev, whose aim is to get Brahmastra whatever it may take, is spectacular. Bachchan is the leader of the cult that safeguards these forces and astras. All these characters could have been memorable. But they are not. Because we know painfully little about them to care.
On the music front too, Brahmastra is a letdown. The albums of both Wake Up Sid and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani were chartbusters, with some of the tracks having cemented that enviable spot of constants on playlists. Composed by Pritam, Brahmastra’s songs are hummable at best, and mostly forgettable.
Part Two—Dev will be the origin story; it will mark the return of the dreaded baddie who wants to conquer it all. I hope Brahmastra takes after The Godfather and the Before trilogies; that its second installment is better than the first. Should you go watch it in a theatre? If you haven’t been to one in a while and are craving the big-screen movie-watching experience, then sure. But don’t expect too much.
Read other pieces by Sneha Bengani here. 
