Bollywood and Science Fiction

There was once a time when Yash Raj Films lay the rules about what was kosher in Bollywood-land. And so, for a good two decades, generations of desi audiences were brought up on sappy bubblegum romances, the occasional family drama and bucket-loads of glycerin tears.

Enter the early 21st century when names like Fox, Warner Bros., and Universal Studios became common knowledge, www.imdb.com was no longer a vague site intended for gora moviegoers, and the Minority Report generation who began demanding sound scripts which actually made sense to anyone above the age of 2. Flummoxed, our fat cat producers, and rip-off directors flew into a tizzy, grabbing at darker, ‘more meaningful’ plots (whatever that means) and more intense acting.

Apart from the occasional Dil Chahta Hai and Lagaan, theater-goers were still unimpressed. What’s worse, the Indian Film Association had now woken up to the existence of foreign entries into the Golden Globe Awards, and a mandatory requirement for participation was ‘no plagiarism’.

Once again, Bollywood went through a major cinematic revolution, and we began to receive movies like Black, Salaam Namaste, and other more ‘youthful’, ‘current’ themes. As an afterthought, our filmmakers began to study Hollywood with a renewed interest, in order to decipher what exactly it is that Warner and Co. do, that RGV Productions couldn’t replicate.

The answer? Superhero and Science Fiction.

The idea caught on like a blazing fire. So, we had Krissh with its ‘faster than a horse’ Hritik Roshan (desi Superman anyone?) and 2050: A Love Story starring Hurman Baweja, Piggy Chops and titli raani. While Krissh did moderately well, filmmakers could not fathom how to recreate a superhero who didn’t look, talk and walk exactly like Krissh. So, they turned to science fiction.

The disastrous reception of 2050: A whatever story notwithstanding, our filmmakers decided to give Science Fiction another go, especially given the mega bucks that could roll in should the success of Koi Mil Gaya be recreated.

And so, at the fag end of 2009, we are faced with not one, but two mega-budget science-fiction ventures:

There’s Ra 1: Starring SRK as a super robot who works for an intelligence agency.
There’s Magic Man starring Neil Nitin Mukesh. What magic has to do with science is still an issue that boggles the mind, but I guess we’ll just have to wait for some promos to figure out exactly how ‘magical’ science can be.

Given our desi Bollywood frat’s penchant for over-exaggeration and masala, I just hope we don’t have to deal with a very handsome super robot who falls in love with a super robot-ess, and has little super-robot children, and only solves crimes when he isn’t busy wooing the super robot in-laws and fighting super robot jealous ex-boyfriend. Not to mention breaking the momentum of the plot every 10 minutes to start lavish song and dance routines with a 200 hundred other vacuous-looking robots in tow.

And please people, if we’re going to be spending crores of rupees on hiring unnecessarily expensive stars, let’s also set aside some budget for special effects so that your movie doesn’t end up looking and sounding like a 5th grade science project, shall we?