“You don’t need language to appreciate this wonderful robot musical”

My first night here, Sanju, her friend, and I went to see Endhiran, a new movie that they said was huge in South India. All I knew going into it was it dealt with robots, was the first sci fi movie from Kollywood, and was sweeping South India. Oh, and it was going to be in Tamil with no subtitles, which means not only would I not understand it, but Sanju and her friend wouldn’t either. Good times.

The whole thing was spectacular. I mean, awful awful movie, but I got the full experience, and today I successfully relayed the plot to Sanju’s roommate. It was so visual and over the top that it was understandable either way, and frankly, my guess is the dialogue sucked. Rajni Kanth plays a robotics professor who, despite being goofy, aged, and career-obsessed, is dating Aishwarya Rai. He builds a robot in his own image, thus doubling his screen time. When some evil Chinese rival professor thwarts Rajni’s success by noting the robot’s lack of morality, Rajni is able to teach the robot feelings. But that allows him to fall in love with Aishwarya Rai, whom he prevented from being gang-raped in the first act (pre-morality) by fending off a crowd of savages on a train. After Aishwarya spurns him, evil Chinese professor is able to get a hold of him and implants him with some sort of evil destruction chip, so he can be sold to German arms dealers (that German dialogue was the only stuff I understood, aside from the brief spurts of English). At this point, queue the musical number “2.0,” heavily influenced by Boom Boom Pow. Next, robot revolts, kills evil Chinese guy, abducts Aishwarya Rai, and makes tons of copies of himself. Queue extremely long musical number wherein Aishwarya tries to drain the robots’ batteries by seducing them, and also does a lot of rapping in English. “Watch me robo shake it, you know you want to break it.” This is the second point when Aishwarya Rai is almost gang-raped. Real Rajnit Kanth comes back, implants a virus in the robots, and reduces the robots to one, from which he removes the destruction chip. Queue the melodramatic ending where the robot dismantles himself upon orders, somewhat akin to the dismantling of Hal.

The next day, everyone we met reacted to this with “Oh! You saw Endhiran! How was it?!” Apparently this movie’s huge, largely because of Rajnit Kanth. He’s a famous actor who’s also gotten into politics, and is somewhat deified here because he’s so famous. When he first got on screen, and when he’d get solos in the musical numbers, the crowd of Tamils would hoot and whistle. Sorta like my experience seeing Wanted in Milwaukee, except with Rajnit Kanth instead of absurd bullet movements and with the Wisconsiners replaced by a bunch of Tamils. But the best way to describe Rajnit Kanth would have to be as the Indian Chuck Norris. When we saw the trust’s lawyers the next day, one told us “You know, Rajnit Kanth doesn’t breathe–air just hides in his lungs. When he does push-ups, he isn’t pushing himself up–he’s pushing the earth down.” My jaw kinda dropped. Now if we could only get Chuck Norris to do some huge musical epics. And get involved in politics beyond endorsing Mike Huckabee.