Bollywood has finally built the sort of giant mythological spectacle it has threatened to build for years. The new Ramayana arrives wrapped in money, technology, stars and advance cultural recognition. Its commercial momentum, tracked breathlessly across the Indian Express entertainment pages, proves there is an audience for a large-screen Indian epic. What it does not prove is that scale has solved storytelling.
I say this as someone who loves the Hindi cinema classics and has no allergy to grandeur. I want armies, palaces, music and impossible skies. I also want human beings inside them. Too many contemporary spectacles behave as if visual enormity is a dramatic emotion. A mountain appears, the score announces awe, and the viewer is expected to complete the transaction.
Reverence can flatten a living story
The Ramayana has survived because it permits retelling. Different regions, languages and traditions emphasise different motives and moral tensions. A film that treats every familiar episode as a sacred box to be ticked may be respectful in intention but lifeless in effect. Reverence becomes interesting only when it sharpens attention; otherwise it is expensive illustration.
The central challenge is Rama. Iconography makes him instantly recognisable, yet drama requires choice, uncertainty and consequence. If a performance is directed entirely toward serene perfection, the character can become a beautifully lit absence. The actor must suggest the cost of duty, not merely its posture.
Ranbir Kapoor is capable of interiority, but celebrity casting creates its own trap. The audience sees the career, publicity and family mythology surrounding the star. A director must work harder to make us forget the brand. Merely placing a star in costume and surrounding him with reverent reaction shots does not create divinity or humanity.
Ravana presents the opposite risk. Modern popular cinema loves villains so operatic that they hijack the story. Commentary collected by the Indian Express entertainment opinion section reflects the continuing argument over how mythic figures should be balanced. I have little interest in protecting characters from complexity. I do object when complexity is confused with giving the antagonist the best entrance, dialogue and digital fire.
Bollywood still mistakes casting for creation
The industry’s faith in famous surnames remains intact. A major production is assembled through recognisable faces, then sold as if familiarity itself were craft. Nepotism does not mean a star child can never act; that is a childish position. It means access arrives before proof and frequently continues after mediocrity.
An epic magnifies this problem because supporting roles require distinction. Courts, forests and battlefields fill with actors who must create a world in limited time. Theatre performers and regional actors often bring texture that polished celebrity casting cannot. If every part is chosen for promotional value, the film resembles an awards-show group photograph.
The classics understood the usefulness of a face the audience had not already consumed. Casting could create a character rather than negotiate with an existing persona. Today’s producers claim unknown actors cannot open a film, then spend fortunes on visual effects while refusing the smaller imaginative risk of discovery.
I would like Bollywood to distinguish between a star and an actor suitable for a role. Sometimes they overlap gloriously. Often they do not. A famous performer may bring financing and attention, but the director’s responsibility is to bend that fame toward the character instead of rewriting the character around the fame.
Technology is only as good as the eye using it
The visual effects debate in Indian cinema is usually juvenile. Fans defend every frame as national pride; detractors compare screenshots with Hollywood films built under different conditions. The useful question is whether the images establish space, weight and feeling. A digitally created creature need not be photorealistic if it belongs aesthetically to the world. It does need to seem affected by light, movement and consequence.
Battle scenes particularly suffer when geography disappears. Thousands of digital bodies collide, but I cannot tell where anyone is going or why a tactical movement matters. The classics used fewer resources and clearer staging. Spectacle is not the number of objects in a frame; it is the precision with which the viewer’s attention moves through them.
Music must do more than certify importance. Indian mythological cinema possesses an extraordinary musical inheritance, but modern scores often combine booming percussion, choral vowels and trailer crescendos into a continuous command to feel. Silence, folk texture and melodic restraint can produce greater awe.
There is also the matter of language. Screenwriters become so afraid of sounding casual that every sentence arrives carved in stone. Elevated dialogue can be beautiful, but if characters speak only in declarations, relationships never breathe. A brother should sometimes sound like a brother, not a commemorative plaque.
Judging the film is not insulting the epic
The most exhausting part of a culturally charged release is the attempt to make criticism morally suspect. One group insists the film must be defended because it represents civilisation; another hopes it fails because they dislike the politics attached to it. Both positions reduce cinema to a loyalty test.
I can respect the Ramayana and find a scene dramatically inert. I can admire the production’s ambition and dislike a performance. No scripture is weakened because an editor held a shot too long. The insistence that reverence forbids aesthetic judgment ultimately patronises both the tradition and the audience.
Conversely, critics should not pretend cultural familiarity is an artistic defect. Recognition can be powerful. The moment before a known event may carry centuries of emotional memory. A skilled filmmaker can use that expectation, delay it, redirect it or reveal an overlooked perspective. Familiarity is material, not a handicap.
Commercial success matters because it may encourage Indian producers to fund large indigenous stories instead of imitating second-hand superhero grammar. Yet the wrong lesson would be that budget plus mythology guarantees cinema. The right lesson is that audiences will show up for ambition; the next task is to reward them with sharper writing.
I am glad Ramayana exists at this scale. Hindi cinema has spent too long shrinking its imagination while inflating its marketing. But I refuse to applaud every choice merely because the production is large or the subject revered. The film should survive the same test as any classic: do its characters remain alive after the spectacle fades?
Bollywood has bought itself a vast canvas. Now it must prove it can paint people rather than posters. Cultural inheritance supplied the story, audiences supplied attention and technology supplied the scale. Drama still has to be made by hand.
