Guest Column by Sabhari - Ayirathil Oruvan

Ayirathil Oruvan has been drawing lots of positive reviews and equal negative reviews.From all the persons I have heard nobody was neutral about the movie.This review is done by one of my friend Sabhari ,who has a keen interest on Movies and equally amazing knowledge on movies..This is a guest review on Ayirathil Oruvan to know the other side opinion on movie which I liked.

Thanks Sabari for the review --- Karthik K

Hyping up a movie by filming it for years together & following it up with good marketing has become the order of the day. One more young & innovative director falls prey to this tactics and he’ll definitely feel bad after looking back at his attempt. Just like any other movie-goer who has seen “Kaadhal Kondaen”, “7G Rainbow colony”, “Pudhupettai” I too had great expectations for the movie. But this one did not only let me down, but has also made me develop an aversion towards this avid film maker.

The premise of the movie – a team of archaeologists (Reema Sen, Andrea and team) with the aid of the Indian government go in search of lost artifacts from the Chozha dynasty ably supported by Karthi and team; what follows is 200 minutes of the director’s imagination (for the plot), and “inspirations” from umpteen number of English movies (for the scenes) made in a very artificial way. Although the first few minutes of the movie create a bit of curiosity about what is in store, you really can’t stop your eyes going to your watch. Songs at unnecessary junctures, kiddish romances that does not add spice to the already dragging scenes, hard to accept make-up, CG etc. follows for the next 45 minutes or so. The various barriers that the team faces are ill-conceived and to add to it is the CG effects. The viewer at times definitely feels that “how do Hollywood movies have such wonderful visual effects or for that matter a Shankar or a Maniratnam movie”.

There are scenes inspired from “Braveheart”, “Gladiator”, “Troy”, “300”, and all the other period war movies that you can think about – the only problem is why does someone need to “hold the line” when you are equipped with Sten guns, pistols and other automatic weapons against a small army with spears and swords. Does the Indian government have so much leisure time and an army of soldiers at their disposal just too fulfill the needs of a set of relatively unimportant people (except for a minister). Even if we ignore all these logical flaws in the movie, the picturization, art direction, music, action, etc. adds only to the already sore eyes, ears and heart.

With very little scope for acting Karthi, Parthiban & Reema have made the most of the chances that they get, but overall the whole cast at times looks irritating due to the badly shot scenes & lack of logic. I really don’t see the use of Adrea’s and Azhagam Perumal’s character. The off-screen team claims to have done a lot of research for the movie, but it hardly shows up on screen except for the first 20 minutes of the second half. The screenplay keeps dangling just to take you to the actual plot and this makes you totally uncomfortable in your seats.

I would not call this as a “valid attempt” by the director – because he is capable of making much better movies and period movies definitely need to have a meaty and convincing storyline. To summarize: Aayirathil Oruvan is a lengthy, costly, noisy, vulgar, meaningless movie. If the man has thoughts of making a sequel for this one, he better drop it right now or get his act together before starting to shoot.