Ramayana: Rise of a Legend review – India’s most expensive film ever becomes spectacular, huge-scale epic

Here is a thoroughly engaging, rousing and spectacular Indian epic melodrama from director Nitesh Tiwari, with music by Hans Zimmer and AR Rahman, based on the ancient classical poem about Rama, the avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. It has often been adapted for live-action and animated movies in the past, though surely not on this scale, the current three-hour blockbuster being only the first half. (There are no musical numbers though.) The idea of aristocrats submitting stoically and yet playfully to exile in the forest has something Shakespearean about it, and if you are suffering from Homer-withdrawal after Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a story about the noble Prince Rama finally vowing to wage war on a distant city where his wife has been abducted might just fit the bill.

Ranbir Kapoor plays the mythical Rama, a noble warrior and statesman who has been brought into being in the city state of Ayodhya as a bodily representative of Vishnu, and from the first his sense of destiny is overwhelming. But what exactly is that destiny? In broad terms, his fate is to face off with Ravana (Naveen “Yash” Kumar), king of far-off Lanka, a figure whose former slave status once triggered in him such a cosmically intense prayer for justice that Lord Brahma offered him the superpower of athletic strength and indifference to pain.

In Ayodhya, Rama marries the sweetly devoted Sita (Sai Pallavi), he enjoys an intense bond of comradeship with his brother Lakshmana (Ravi Dubey), and is the apple of his father’s eye; this is King Dasharatha (Arun Govil) who, careworn by affairs of state, is about cede the throne to Rama. But Rama’s stepmother Kaikeyi (Lara Dutta) furiously reminds Dasharatha that he promised the crown to Bharata (Adinath Kothare), the son they had together. Rama, Sita and Lakshmana are banished to the forest.

Over in Lanka, a toxic stew of plotting against Ravana is being stirred by his slippery, smirking brother-in-law Vidyutjihva (played by Bollywood veteran Vivek Oberoi), whom Ravana ruthlessly slays in single combat; this man’s widow Shurpanakha (Rakul Preet Singh), who is Ravana’s sister, is banished to the same forest where Rama is humbly eking out his civilian existence. She falls in love with Rama, using her witchy wiles to trick and bamboozle the happily married man, and this is to lead to a cataclysmic confrontation between Rama and Ravana.

With its giant canvas and some truly beautiful sunset skyscapes, this very enjoyable film has a little of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and even Disney’s The Lion King (the latter surely influenced the animal-kingdom tableaux). The bizarre flying machine piloted by Ravana (who does not have the ability to fly as such) has something engagingly Gilliamesque about it. As so often with Indian cinema, this movie reminds you of the forthright, unselfconscious storytelling energy that popular Hollywood films had in the 1950s and 60s, the era of sword-and-sandal. It’s a rather amazing adventure.