'Love Story 2050': SFX sans brains!

Movie Review by Deepa Gahlot

Baweja took care of the future with a lavish budget – all flying cars, teleportation, talking, robots, holograms—but well, what about the present? 

Aren't we bored of Hindi films shot abroad for no reason at all, of poor little rich guys, of giggly trying-to-be-cute girls; guys chasing girls all over the place and then singing songs and not even asking for each other's phone numbers and email ids! So then they have to depend on magical CG butterflies to help to reunite them.

Harman Baweja, as Karan Malhotra, has a long introduction sequence, during which we see small parts of his face, then profile and then, voila, the Face, which resembles Hrithik Roshan's!

Karan whines because rich daddy doesn't care about him, he talks to his dead mum and flips for girl in baby doll dress, chasing a butterfly. Now he chases Sana (Priyanka Chopra) up and down the streets, up and down a rollercoaster, and so on. This is most of the first half and we are still in 2008—in picturesque Australia where Karan's Uncle Ya (Boman Irani) is making a time machine and Sana's mother (Archana Puran Singh) speaks in an exaggerated Bhatinda accent.

Between one thing and another, and so as not to put in any spoilers, Karan, Uncle Ya (trying to be Einstein) and Sana's kid siblings land up in Mumbai 2050. It's Gothic hell, out of who-knows-how-many Hollywood sci-fi films and comics. And, horrors, a masked villain like Darth Vader from Star Wars.

In 2050, Sana is an irritatingly self-obsessed, red-haired rock star Zeisha, and Karan has to make her fall in love with him and take her back to 2008. Now, even by the put-brains-on-hold  logic of Bollywood cinema, Karan can't stay on in 2050 because he will age by 42 years, but if Zeisha went back, wouldn't she regress back into the womb?

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Love Story 2050: First Day First Show

Don't argue, Baweja seems to say; just admire futuristic buildings, flying cars, a virtual reality Mortal Combat game, light sabre fights, weird outfits, music concerts in the sky and all that the special effects guys have painstakingly put together, and which the scriptwriters have wrecked with their lacklustre plotting. So the 2050 section becomes one long meaningless set-piece (with clever product placement—good to know that we might be using the same car tyres, soap and computer software brands 42 years from now) -- with no emotional connect with the audience. 

Harman Baweja is good-looking, muscular, dances well, is not required to act much. The purpose of the Rs 50 crore extravaganza is served— he gets a foot into the Bollywood door, and from all accounts, already has his career chalked out.

Unfortunately Priyanka Chopra still acts like those coy simpering Miss Neeta heroines of the sixties. Boman Irani and Archana Puran Singh ham away. Anu Malik's music has an old-fashioned sound—and the choreography is not too hot either.

Just shows that Bollywood filmmakers have to get a grip on the present first, before making these leaps into the future. We don't yet have a substantial sci-fi literature of our own,  half of the country is still in the bullock cart age,  so obviously the content and imagery is borrowed from the West.  No matter how well it is done, it still looks and feels fake.

Source: India Syndicate