Ram Setu Review

Available now on rent with Amazon Prime, Ram Setu is a movie I wanted to watch, but the trailer made me doubt its quality enough that I didn’t want to take a trip to the theaters.

The movie’s plot is all about an atheist archeologist trying to discover if the Ram Setu is a natural formation or a man-made structure at the behest of some corporate overlords.

I found the film to be extremely lazily made and it feels like a cash grab attempt to rake in the box office moolah. It’s a very weak attempt to make money off Shri Ram’s name.

The film is extremely weak technically. Let me list a few of them.

A scene introducing us to the villain, shot in ‘rain’ where the source of the water is clearly coming from a hose pipe besides the camera. Not to mention a reporter mentions a ‘LOT of people are protesting’. But on screen there is barely 20 or 30 people. Maybe they forgot to give the budget for digital doubles to populate the rest of the scene.

In a scene where the villains are chasing the hero on speed boats, the villain’s henchman has a gun with its stock gone back (indicating it’s not working). He keeps firing the same non working gun for 2 more scenes (with artificial looking muzzle flashes). That’s laughable.

The production thinks the people watching the movie are dumb. Taking the audience for granted.

Not to mention a lot of the Background scores are rip-offs of Hollywood classics.

The scene introducing us to the floating lab rips off the Jurassic Park theme. The next scene where the hero (Akshay aka Aryan) is wearing the underwater suit has the music ripped off from “My Heart will go on’ from Titanic!

The techno ‘Ram Ram’ song is fine, but it is used VERY horribly. It doesn’t have any impact on the film as its not used during anything climactic. Bollywood JUST doesn’t know to use music well (copied or otherwise). They used the track better in the trailers for sure.

The CGI scenes are extremely weak. The scene of them looking for a waterfall in Sri Lanka is so badly composited, it has some graphics out of scale with the others. Every person may not notice the details of what is wrong, but it just bad enough to be noticeable that something is not working in the VFX.

The film itself never gets too serious or hectic even when characters are dying it doesn’t seem like a big deal and the seriousness doesn’t come through. So can blame the editing there a bit as well.

The entire second half of the film drags on a lot. The ending is decent with some facts thrown in but it’s a bit too little and too late to save the film.

Don’t even get me started on the helicopter scene towards the ending. That’s one of the worst blue screen scenes in cinema history.

Overall: If you are really curious, it’s an ok one-time watch. But one has to ignore the bad CGI, the bad acting, the bad dialogs. I only enjoyed the last 15 mins or so as it had some facts thrown into the screenplay as Akki suddenly plays the lawyer in the ongoing proceedings and there is a small but fun ending twist which I saw coming a mile away, but it’s still nice.

Rating: 5/10. One time watch when its free on Amazon Prime. No point renting it also.