2.0 review: Shankar's imagination loses its core

When Shankar made Enthiran, the labour of love that he put into it was visible. The perfect lyrics when the intro song ( a mandatory item for a Rajini movie) played - Puthiya Manitha - but its for the humanoid robot preserving the soul of a SPB rendition but with the techno music that Rahman manages to weave as a ticking time bomb. It set the tone of the movie and raised the existential question in a sci-fi movie - "whether a new class of humans that are actually robots and what it holds in store". There is awe, intrigue,  a sense of what the future will unfold all masterfully executed with lyrics that go as

eral Kanaiyam Thunbam Illai…Ithaya Kolaar Aethumillai

 Thanthira Manithan Vazhvathillai…Enthiran Vizhvathilla
You don’t have any anatomical problems…
The wise shall not live forever..while the robot will never fall
Karuvil Pirantha Ellam Marikkum

Arivil Piranthathu Marippathey Illai
The one fed in the womb shall die…
But what comes of knowledge shall never perish….
Idho En Enthiran Ivan Amaran
Idho En Enthiran Ivan Amaran
This is my Robot…and he’s immortal..

This unit of work - that is the entry song and the set up of the man vs machine debate in the beggining as the humanoid robot takes shape in the lab is what made Enthiran a complete movie - it stayed true to the most basic of the sci-fi template but had the commercial dollops that define a Shankar movie and both the actor Rajni and the superstar rajni and the villainous rajni. 

2.0 does not have that finesse , that balance , that strong core that was there in Enthiran and was there in Shankars Indian ( a core principle of giving bribes as wrong as taking them). 

I feel Shankar was so bogged down by the mechanics of getting the special effects right for the showdown and key scenes of the movie ( the scenes in the soccer stadium match any Hollywood biggie) , that he forgot the core. 

the movies strongest core belongs not to the hero but the eventual villain. Dr. Pakshirajan ( an aptly cast Akshay Kumar) is an ornithologist who is worried about birds dying due to excessive radiation of cellular towers that increase the frequencies to save on bandwidth. ( as a telecom guy I did not realise that this is plausible since by increasing the frequencies you can save the backhaul bandwidth costs ) . The theory is believable to some extent ( another Shankar specialty) , since I did feel that I am seeing less sparrows overall.  So Dr. Pakshirajan tries a lot to convince government officials and fails and commits suicide. His spirit then becomes a huge negative force that goes against the root cause of the radiation. Now this could have been a movie of its own - the classic Shankar vigilante justice movie - of Anniyan without the Garuda puran but with the scheming politicians who get unnerved easily ( the politician track provides the only humour in the movie) 

Now whether birds are dying or not , smartphones are ruling our lives and telecom companies are just providing the utility services needed for it. So you can have an interesting Shankar 'what if' scenario, what if a force takes away the smartphones from us - the masterful scenes of thousands of cell phones flying away. Now this can be a sci-fi movie on its own, where man is fighting the same machine that is making him more productive. 

But we now have the third arc - because its an 2.0 , a sequel to Enthiran , so we need the infrastructure created the scientist Vaseegran and his robot Chitti who has both positive and negative shades to him. 

So instead of 1 movie we actually get a mish mash of 3 movies.  So the negative force of Pakshirajan who is wreaking havoc by capturing the cellphones to feed his electricity needs to keep the 'spirit' or what the movies tries to call scientifically as the aura ( another Shankarism) and going after the root cause. Hence the positive force of Vaseegrans infrastructure needs to combat it . The movie is still good when Vaseegran and his assistant Nila ( another humanoid robot creatively named as ) do some sleuthing around to find what is happening. Its a masterstroke to cast Amy Jackson as a robot to completely nullify any need for acting). Nila also provides for some jealousy , so she is the real robot who is causing trouble to Vaseegrans love life ( that is kept alive by phone calls from Aishwarya) . 

It is when the movie gets into the fourth dimension of the battle of Pakshiraja feeding off cellphone energy and the various versions of Chitti ( yes there is Chitti 2.0 and a masterful Kutti 3.0 where Rajni gives a few maniacal moments) , that the role reversal of good and evil starts to make no sense especially when Chitti starts calling Pakshi raja - just an angry bird. So the core cause is diluted to provide a grand visual spectacle. The visuals are grand and when the 2 robots stand tall to fight each other, its definitely a proud moment for Indian cinema and the special effects are astounding. So while Pakshi raja could be a super hero or villain in any Marvel franchise but he is a bit misplaced in a sci-fi movie. 

if you can enjoy this movie as 3-4 disconnected movies, its a great treat but if you try to watch it as one movie, it does not have a core, as if the operating system that connects the 4 different CPUs could not handle the load on it . Shankar did not have a multi-processor for his overactive brain to execute more clinically but he definitely makes a bold attempt. Imagination never needed a MRI Scan, and its still alive.