Film Notes: RRR

When RRR premiered across the world, audiences outside of India had never seen anything like it. That's not due entirely to unfamiliarity with Telegu cinema, either—even audiences in the home state of Tamil hadn't seen anything quite like S.S. Rajamouli's newest film. It was, quite literally, unprecedented in a number of ways. It was the most expensive Indian film of all time, and it starred two massive, massive names in Telegu cinema, brought together in the same movie for the first time: N. T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan. Rao and Charan are generationally famous stars, each third in the line of a legendary filmmaking dynasty. When they star in a film, those movies are events, and, in India, it's incredibly rare for movie stars of a certain caliber to share the screen.

Rao and Charan had both separately worked with Rajamouli before in prior films and, breaking from their respective family's traditions, had struck up an off-camera friendship for years. Rajamouli brought the two together with an ambitious, unprecedented idea: a three hour plus historical action epic about two legendary Indian revolutionaries battling against the British empire. It wouldn't be a N.T.R. film and it wouldn't be a Ram film—it would be a movie about two equal mega-superstars sharing the scene and the story as dual protagonists, breaking with three generations of isolated Telegu movie stardom. It would quite literally have twice the amount of A-list acting talent that other films had. But even without knowing that context, international audiences can feel something major is happening when Bheem (Rao Jr.) and Raju (Charan) grip each other's arms during the fiery first meeting between their characters. There's simply no American equivalent to compare to this break from Indian blockbuster filmmaking tradition, and that maximalist "why not?" glee continues through the entire film. The whole film is built out of climaxes, each scene so over-the-top in its aims and ambitions that Rajamouli really does reach heights of mythic filmmaking.