Endiran

Cast: Rajinikanth, Aiswarya Rai, Danny Denzongpa Music: AR Rahman Direction: Shankar

Now, Shankar has obviously seen Artificial Intelligence (AI), I Robot and Transformers and liked them. He has not come out of the Matrix hangover and probably never will. He likes his songs and often doesn't care where he places them in the script. He likes to amplify emotions for melodramatic effects so love comes out as lust and anger comes out as aggression. Having said all that, no one can deny that he was a pioneer of a new kind of commercial cinema, one so successful that it produced a breed of directors such as Dharani, Hari, Susi Ganesan, etc. who brazenly followed Shankaresque format. It was about time he raised the bar.

Looking at Endiran, we can only imagine the number of brainstorming sessions he must have had with writer Sujatha during all these years when he was incubating the project. Shankar will be the best judge as to how successfully it has turned out and also, at the risk of blasphemy, how much he had to compromise in order to accommodate Rajinikanth in the role.

For hardcore Rajinikanth fans, Endhiran may be quite satisfying. Here Rajini is the hero, Rajini is the villain, Rajini is the machine, the cloned robots, and at some point in the climax, Rajinis are the only things seen on the screen, other humans simply reduced to being insects caught in the storm. Those fans will simply be happy to just watch more and more of him for two and half hours. I don't think you'll find it difficult to believe in the existence of such fans. I even know of one who actually believed Baba was a good film. Nevertheless, for other Rajinikanth admirers, which comprise the entire Tamil speaking population, the film may be a bit disappointing. There are no typical Rajinikanth elements that we have come to expect. He doesn't enter the frame in the midst of drum rolls and flying confetti. He doesn't deliver 'punch dialogues'. Worse still, in a potential brawl situation, the scientist Rajini actually runs away from a lone fisherman, a stark contrast from the Rajini who made minced meat out of about fifty top rowdies of the city in Sivaji. You may say he is just a 'scientist'! Well, he was just a 'software engineer' in Sivaji and that didn't deter him from breaking their bones? As if to compensate for that, the other Rajini, the robot, pulverises goons, runs over a speeding train, leaps forward and backward across a flyover from a speeding car amidst chasing police vans, and demolishes army battalions in a mad frenzy.

Leaving aside the Rajini factor, the film's landscape and vision is impressive and at times breathtaking. That it has taken Shankar courage to think up such a story, albeit with ample support from Sujatha and Karky, and execute it effectively calls for commemoration. Although actors who are much younger and more agile such as Shah Rukh Khan would have fit the role more convincingly, who, but Shankar, would have thought that Rajinikanth can fit into the role? And what would Shankar had been thinking when he was reworking on the script to fit Rajinikanth? Well, did he even make those changes?

More than how the movie itself has turned out, it is worth noting what the movie represents as a commercial product, especially to Tamil film industry. Shankar never claimed to change the nuances of Tamil cinema. He is not a Balu Mahendra and never claimed to be. However, in his own small way, or shall we say 'big budget way', Shankar has changed the way commercial films are conceived, made, and even marketed. He introduced the concept of 'blockbuster' to South Indian film industries. In that sense, Gentleman was to Tamil cinema what Jaws was to Hollywood. He exploited the concept of saturation release with Sivaji, now being done by almost every second producer in the South. The term blockbuster originated from the warfare technology, connected with the powerful aerial bombs of World War II that were capable of destroying whole housing blocks. With Endhiran, Shankar has introduced another warfare term 'carpet bombing' to film marketing. Regardless of which weaponry you are applying to market your product, if you don't have impressive script filled with great original ideas, it will actually be your film that will be bombed. I don't know if Shankar thinks about marketing at all during the scripting phase. I would like to think he doesn't. Some would claim that he doesn't need to. Whatever may be the case, one thing is sure: no other Tamil filmmaker thinks like Shankar.