A prime example of Kollywood, or Tamil, movie madness that plays like some unholy combination of THE TERMINATOR, ROBOCOP and I, ROBOT. Released in 2010, ROBOT was for a time the most expensive Indian movie ever made, and utilized the expertise of several special effects technicians filched from the Stan Winston Studio. Luckily it was a massive success, and is still counted as one of the lucrative Tamil movies ever.
Its director Shankar is currently the highest-paid filmmaker in India, and is preparing a sequel to ROBOT, entitled 2.0, that’s set to be released in November 2018. We’ll see how that turns out, but right now let’s take a look at ROBOT, which opens with the creation of a humanoid named Chitti.
Played by the veteran Tamil superstar Rajnikanth, Chitti was constructed by one Professor Vaseegaran (who’s also played by Rajnikanth) for the purpose of assisting the military. Chitti’s attributes include the ability to read an entire book at a single glance, super-human strength, impossibly fast running, wall climbing, etc. He proves those latter things by helping Vaseegaran’s GF Sana (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, a.k.a. “India’s darling”) with some asshole neighbors who are playing loud music—by blowing up their stereo—and again on a train when said neighbors attempt to enact revenge on Sana for destroying their property. Needless to say, the punks don’t last very long against Chitti! But when Chitti is called upon to save the residents of a burning building he screws up, and a young woman ends up dead.
It would seem Chitti’s luster has been dimmed, but then he’s unexpectedly struck by lightning one night. This fries his circuits, and he comes back changed. This lightning-addled Chitti is more emotional than the former one, and proves his newfound soulfulness by helping birth a seemingly unbirthable baby in a hospital delivery room. He also demands Vaseegaran pay him for his labors and, more worryingly, finds himself developing feelings for Sana, reciting quasi-poetic hymns to her body parts (such as “Her lips are like soft rose petals”).
This latter element occurs, unfortunately, just as Vaseegaran asks Sana to marry him. This drives a permanent wedge between Chitti and Vaseegaran, and causes the latter to destroy his creation and deposit its remains in the local dump. This in turn inspires Bohra (Danny Denzongpa), a rival professor, to track down and rebuild Chitti, transforming him into a lightning side burn sporting killing machine bent on destruction.
There’s a lot more to this 2½ film, which I’ll leave to you to discover on your own. If you’re like me (which is to say: a Westerner) the ultra-broad slapstick, goofy music numbers and uneasy mixture of practical and CGI effects may seem off-putting at first, but the film, I promise, will win you over with its hyper-imaginative, go-for-broke spirit. There’s no padding that I could discern in its three hour runtime, and no shortage of demented inspiration.
Particularly fun bits include one in which Chitti, attempting to catch a mosquito, ends up engaging in a conversation with said mosquito and his sewer-dwelling companions. And another in which Chitti attempts to ferret out the lone human in a midst of an army of lookalike robots by randomly stabbing and/or chopping the heads off his minions. And then there’s the positively batshit climax, in which Chitti’s robot minions combine to form themselves into giant guns, drills, snakes and battering rams.
There are some questionable elements, as when the light skinned Sana attempts to make Vaseegaran jealous by asking a dark-skinned man to be her “boyfriend for a day,” even though he’s “dark and ugly,” and an eyeball replacement sequence shamelessly recycled from a similar scene in THE TERMINATOR. But for the most part the film is a pleasing commercial spectacle with a juicy star turn by Rajnikanth, who’s equally captivating playing good and bad robots.
Vital Statistics
ROBOT (ETHIRAN)
AVM Productions
Director: Shankar
Producer: Kalanidhi Maran
Screenplay: Shankar
Cinematography: Ratnavelu
Editing: Anthony
Cast: Rajnikanth, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Danny Denzongpa, Santhanam, Karunas, Delhi Kumar, Cochin Hanifa, Kalabhavan Mani, Devadarshini Chetan, Sabu Cyril, CHaams, Shriya Sharma, Sugunthan, Kriz Chris Henri Harriz