RRR

RRR (2022) takes two real revolutionaries and invents a friendship that never happened. Komaram Bheem was a Gond tribal leader in Telangana, Alluri Sitarama Raju an insurgent against British rule in Andhra Pradesh. They never met. Rajamouli built the film precisely on that gap. In his own words: they never met each other, so what if they had, what if they had inspired each other. It is set in Delhi in the 1920s, before either man's real struggle began, and it makes no secret of being entirely fictitious. The numbers describe the scale. At 550 crore rupees it was the most expensive Indian film ever made on release, and it grossed between 1,300 and 1,387 crore worldwide. It shot for over 300 days across India, Ukraine and Bulgaria with around 3,000 technicians, and it was the first Indian film shot on Arri Alexa LF cameras. Naatu Naatu won Best Original Song at the 95th Academy Awards, the first song from an Asian film to take that category, and RRR remains the only Indian feature to win an Academy Award. It runs 187 minutes. Good for: action at enormous scale, stories about brotherhood, and choreography and music. Less good for: it is over three hours and physics is entirely suspended. The anti colonial heroism is told in simplified terms and the British characters are one dimensional caricatures.