robot

the film is beyond brilliant. expecting a rollercoaster star vehicle like sivaji, i was taken in by the first half's mad over the top jokiness. so you can imagine how stunned i was by the dark oedipal drama of the second half.

rajni the scientist ignores his lover in the quest for making a machine in his image- his child, born from him, and carrying in his metallic body all of whom rajni wants to be. except that 'one thing'- 'feelings' is what we are told but really we all know it is the phallus. this inability for a robot to reproduce is mirrored in a sequence when danny's rival robot humps the ground in a useless gesture of failure and ends up shooting the groin of an outline of a man used as a target.

the girlfriend of the scientist adores this harmless de-masculinised version of her lover who follows her every wish and saves her from being raped. these infantile antics are mistaken for much more by the robot when he develops human emotions as love. the father and the son fall for the same woman. a competiton between them leads ot the father destroying the son in an act of spectacular violence.

all this while we believe that the film is, like so many other science fiction films, a love hate relationship with technology and its possibilities and dangers- the danger of super rationality and the irrationality of our desires. and this is a theme through the film- in many a dialogue and scene. man against machine. the power of man's mind and the fear of uncontrollable technology.

in the second half the robot reappears in a violent form- corrupted by danny's jealousy. danny is now a foster father. faced with his own extinction the robot begins to reproduce. multiple versions of himself form an army of him- without that one missing part- feelings / phallus. the girl is kidnapped and kept in a sexless imprisonment until she agrees to make robosapiens with the villain- more sexless reproduction. the only difference between machine and man is sexuality.

in a superb climactic fight, the multiple robots come together, merge all their identities to become one overpowering machine.. they form and reform into spheres and walls, snakes and screws, joined together by one brain in multiple centers- a rhizome that can only be destroyed through a virus that penetrates through all defences. it is only apt that this sequence is filmed in the disconnected half built mind-spaces of chennai and mumbai. here glass clad building overlook these mad machines escaped from the call cnters on desolate streets with half built infrastructure everywhere, buildings under construction and flyovers leading into the sky. the internal sequences are in lab like antiseptic chrome and glass.

so well done- and so much darker than i had thought it would be. even the music seems to come out of some strange fusion of machine and man. the song sequences and dances are cyborg dreams. there is no real happy ending here. even at the end when the son dismantles himself to save his father, he is still in love with his mother.