Can't imagine I'm the only one who found my way to this two-part Indian epic after salivating over "RRR."
"Bahubali" doesn't meet "RRR" standards, but few things would. Made a few years earlier, this film looks much cheaper -- some of the CGI is so bad that the movie almost looks like a video game cut scene at times. And the actors just don't hold the screen the way the two leads in "RRR" did. It started to really lose me toward the end, during a loooong battle scene that feels interminable and made my eyes start to glaze over. If I'd known going in that what starts as a flashback wouldn't so much be a flashback as the actual real story of the movie, I would have been prepared. But as it is, the transition into a whole different story at the mid-way point really threw me and killed what momentum the film had been building.
Not completely satisfying as a stand-alone experience, but it does improve a bit when taken with the second part.
Grade: B.
"Bahubali" doesn't meet "RRR" standards, but few things would. Made a few years earlier, this film looks much cheaper -- some of the CGI is so bad that the movie almost looks like a video game cut scene at times. And the actors just don't hold the screen the way the two leads in "RRR" did. It started to really lose me toward the end, during a loooong battle scene that feels interminable and made my eyes start to glaze over. If I'd known going in that what starts as a flashback wouldn't so much be a flashback as the actual real story of the movie, I would have been prepared. But as it is, the transition into a whole different story at the mid-way point really threw me and killed what momentum the film had been building.
Not completely satisfying as a stand-alone experience, but it does improve a bit when taken with the second part.
Grade: B.