Dashaavatharam-The review of a blogger

i am not an active film critic,not even an authority to speak on films....but if i don't write about dashavatharam it might be refusing to comment on one of the most wonderful works of art,ignorance about one of the most brilliant scripts ever written in Indian cinema and oblivion of one of the greatest actors of all time........
Sure,i should have to mention here that there is a considerable amount of people who did not like that movie...fair to them,it is pardonable for a mega project worth 165 crores from kollywood is widely expected to be a run of the mill kind of story with all action,colour,dance,drama and sensuality( its a Kamal flick of course!!)........But Dashavatharam falls short of most or so it seems,the action is good,so is Avtar singhs dance but the storyline seems to happen all too quickly for comfort.......A lot of my friends were saying the 10 avtars were a show off and they damaged the base story....so on and so forth.....even my father,a hard core Kamal fan seems to think the movie is not good......Respect to all of you,till the half way stage of the movie,i was like you tooo..........But then the intermission happened.....
Sitting in a dark corner in a theatre in nedumangadu me and Kichu were shocked to a great extend by what we had seen......The first 15 minutes and Rangaraja Nambi were superb....But the story in the future did not seem to make any sense...was this turning out to be another of those big budget mega flops.....Sceptically we decided to put our grey cells into the matter....Were there meanings hidden to all that we were seeing?......
Kichu lit up the first idea......Like the fight between the shaivas and vaishnavas in the 12th century...here in the 21st century also we are in the middle of a fight,like the religious sects of 12th century trying to destroy each other now we have super powers and super terrorists and a deadly vial in between.....
In the beginning we see Rangaraja Nambi perishing for holding on to his beliefs......The scene is breathtakingly shot and Kamal sir excells in the role.....so does Asin and even Nepolean as the Saivite king.......
Then the focus shifts to Govind a biotechnologist working in a lab in America.....He flees of with a deadly vial when his boss tries to sell it for big money....and after him comes Christian Fletcher(again Kamal Hasan) an ex CIA agent and the hot again looking Mallika Sherawat......
The scene shifts to India where the rest of the avatars come into the picture.............
As Balram Naidu the(Telugu not to be missed)CBI officer Kamal as the story teller and protagonist(s) portrays the present day habit of officials to come to their own conclusions and refuse to even lend an ear to poor Govind's plight..........
Christian Fletcher is an architypical anti hero and one of the best in recent memory....it was easily the avatar which caught notice by normal film goers like me............
But more than the avtars it was what each stood for that mattered........
We had Govind,Fletcher,Balram Naidu all main characters in the base story......Then we had sub plots for each characters.....Krishnaveni Amma who had lost her son and with it her mental stability to whom is addressed the deadly vial......
There is a scene in the film where Krishnaveni Amma slips the vial into an idol of Perumal.....Here the story passively tells us of the dangers of religion, of how peopler misusing the belief to meet their own personal ends is just as dangerous as a vial today........
Then we have the story of Vincent Poovaragan,a dalit leader up against the sand mining lobby.......He is easily one of the characters you take back after watching the movie.....The touching scenes where he saves the lives of the children of the head of the illegal sand miners who threatens to kill him at the time of the tsunami giving up his own life in the process is nothing but a great display of humanity.......
And the scene in the climax where Krishnaveni Amma recognises Vincent as her long lost son is also touching....But also to be noted is that it is a brahmin woman recognising a dalit as her son..........
Then the character of Shingen Narahashi(inspired from Narasimha of the original dasavathars),silently touches on Hiroshima and Nagasaki through his pupil Yuka who is killed by Fletcher.......Narahashis quest for revenge also reaches its climax just before the climax of the film......
Then we had Kalifullah,a 7 foot giant whose plot showcases the trials faced by a muslim family suspected of being terrorists......
Then of Avtar Singh a Sikh singer who has a tumour in his throat....The end of his story may resmble an old Rajni kanth story line but the way it has been taken in the film is good enough to make us believe in it........
The story of Govind and Andal,is again passively told by the director to be the continuation from that of Rangaraja Nambis......That they get reunited in the end at the same place where Rangaraja Nambi and his wife get seperated.....
The story basically has 10 subplots which gets intertwined and finally reaches a common climax with the tsunami.....
In each of the dialogues and of the film the director and scrpit writer sometimes sarcastically,sometimes passively takes a dig at a lot of social happenings.........
In short for me personally Dasavathaaram is definately an epic ,a film which has something for everyone watching it.......Just that we have to inspect hard to appreciate it..........