Raavanan

Raavanan (2010) tells the Ramayana from the other side, putting Ravana, the epic's villain, at the centre and letting you consider that he might be right. Veeraiya is an outlaw living in the forest whom the local people treat as a protector. When inspector Dev disrupts his arrangement, Veeraiya answers by abducting Dev's wife Ragini. What follows takes fourteen days: Ragini tries to escape, Dev searches, and as she listens to the man who took her, which of them is the monster stops being clear. The bravest thing Mani Ratnam does is refuse to make Dev likeable. The Rama of the epic is here a functionary, a hunter, and increasingly an uncomfortable figure. The film's best known feature is how it was made. Ratnam shot it simultaneously in Tamil and Hindi. In the Tamil Raavanan, Vikram plays the abductor; in the Hindi Raavan, Abhishek Bachchan plays that part and Vikram plays the police inspector instead. Aishwarya Rai plays the same role in both. All versions opened on the same day, 18 June 2010. The two were received very differently: the Tamil version was liked, the Hindi one was not. Santosh Sivan's cinematography and the forest photography are the strongest things in it. It runs 134 minutes. Good for: Indian cinema, mythological adaptation, and Mani Ratnam. Less good for: there is violence, abduction and threat are the central subject, and the plot occasionally comes apart.