Prestigious Bahubali

By the time you read this, Bahubali 2 might have set many more benchmarks. It deserves to.

India is known for magical stories steeped in mythology (or the other way around) and S.S. Rajamouli has been honing his craft using these two ingredients, magic and myth, steadily ever since he burst into our screens. 

The lift-off was awesome, speed was giddy, journey was mind boggling, only till a point...

I have never seen such a burst of creativity displayed in an Indian movie before. The scene where senior Bahubali 'sees' Devasena for the first time - is sheer poetry imagined and executed to perfection.

The two arrows (colour coded to identify the archers!!!) from two chariots hunting down on a wild boar, colliding at a point well before the target, one arrow deflecting the other and still landing on the wild boar - I wanted to whistle!

I was so sucked into the magic unfolding in front of me, my smile became a grin and stayed that way till the courtyard scene where Devasena stands trial for a purported act of crime and the audacity that follows it (for me, that was the high point of the film). 

Then something caved in...

The lift-off was awesome, speed was giddy, journey was mind boggling and just when I thought we left our galaxy, inexplicably, suddenly, I found myself crash landing in the rugged road paved by so many Telugu movies before...

That jolt sprang up this quote in my mind:

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. 

The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. 

The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. 

You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".”

The pledge was perfect, the turn was awesome and the prestige, that all important third act, was simply missing!

I suspect Rajamouli planned for a three part series but crammed part 2 and part 3 into one due to various constraints, fatigue being the foremost, I am just speculating as he already spent five years in the making...

Though the money and time I spent was totally worth it, I still felt a third act would have been just perfect; like The Prestige!.