Kalki 2898AD

Kalki is an epic Nag Ashwin’s sci-fi epic inspired by Hindu mythology brings together various genre inspirations and stars from all over India. It tells us the story of mahabharat and also explains how the world will be in the upcoming days.

This world-building is introduced as we meet a clutch of key characters. First and foremost is Bhairava (Prabhas, like Dwayne Johnson but with better dance moves), a wisecracking, self-interested mercenary ripe for emotional redemption. He decides to pursue a bounty in Sum-80 (Deepika Padukone), a runaway from the Complex who is part of a nefarious experiment that extracts magical fetal tissue from farmed pregnant women that Supreme Yaskin uses to moisturise his desiccated frame.

Indeed, the last 15 minutes of Kalki 2898 AD, with a huge pile up of reveals, reversals, shocks and cliff hangers is positively enervating but in a fun way that feels earned by all the groundwork laid out in the previous two and three-quarters hours. It all starts in the battlefield 3,000-odd years ago, where warrior Ashwatthama (played by superstar Amitabh Bachchan), a character in the epic Sanskrit poem the Mahabharata, is cursed by Krishna for trying to kill an unborn child. His punishment is to live for ever until he rights this wrong by saving a future reincarnation of God.

We begin in the age of the “Mahabharat,” where Ashwatthama (a terrifyingly de-aged Amitabh Bachchan) is told by Krishna (Krishnakumar, voiced by Arjun Das) that he must deliver Vishnu’s final avatar Kalki to safety, whenever that day may come. Six thousand years later, it’s time, when the city of Kashi is the last vestige of civilization on the planet. Everyone is hungry, poor, and fighting for resources — everyone except those living in The Complex, a massive inverted pyramid hovering over the city, and ruled by a “god” referred to as Supreme (Kamal Haasan), who sustains his life force with the aid of a serum that’s been forcibly extracted from the wombs of fertile women (all of whom look visibly pregnant, even if the details of what’s actually growing inside of them remains a subject of great mystery and confusion).

Around the beginning of the film, we see some beautifully presented snapshots of human horror (hunger, corruption, war, genocide, all of it). This compilation of drawings does more to present a sense of dystopian horror than the events of the actual film. Sure, there’s material in the film for you to think about and attribute cause. Women are dispensable objects. Their foetuses are extracted by a Matrix-like machine for the villain’s survival. The film also establishes that this world, lacking any real life, seems on the verge of extinction already. So, yes, if you ponder over these details, this world does seem horrific. But the film’s job isn’t just to inform and expect you to ponder; its job is to make you feel too.

Before there’s any time to digest this we jump to the year 2898, where Earth is a withered dystopia. The first and last city is Kasi, which consists of a slum on the ground and a ginormous inverted pyramid called the Complex – the ultimate high-rise – floating in the air; all of it ruled over by a cruel semi-divine dictator named Supreme Yaskin (Kamal Haasan).

The most engaging action includes Bhairava using replicas of himself to divert his opponents, a chase in futuristic vehicles, and any time Bachchan gets involved, because Ashwatthama is supposed to be eight feet tall (there’s even a quick scene with knockoff lightsabers).

The much-hyped VFX deliver on their promise thanks to a vivid array of cityscapes, future tech, and explosions, the visuals only faltering when the de-aged Bachchan tries to deliver dialogue. There is a life-sized recreation of Michaelangelo’s “David” that gets knocked over, which would not make any more sense if I contextualized it. At a reported $75 million, it’s India’s most expensive film to date.

There is a good and bad side of everyone, ever human being has the desire to have a good life and here in the story it tells us that the world in many years from now will not even see how river, trees and other natural things look like so other people would die to see even a glimpse of these things so they will fight with each other.