I want Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana to work. That confession will disappoint readers who prefer critics to arrive carrying a small axe, especially when a film is expensive, starry and surrounded by the perfume of destiny. I want it to work because Hindi cinema has forgotten how to make grandeur feel morally serious. The old mythologicals did not possess digital armies or global-format ambitions, but their makers understood that the epic was not a costume catalogue. Duty, exile, temptation and power mattered more than the size of a virtual horizon. The new Ramayana has Ranbir Kapoor, Sai Pallavi, Yash and an industrial apparatus designed to announce Indian cinema to the world. Fine. My reservation is brutally simple: Bollywood cannot demand reverence for the text while asking us to suspend judgment about the familiar machinery of privilege around the film.
A sacred source is not a critical shield
The film’s worldwide release plans and multilingual positioning were confirmed by the production company in this account of its international premieres. Trade coverage has also highlighted its premium-format ambitions, including the IMAX release plan. The messaging is unmistakable: this is not merely a Hindi film but a global cultural event. Once a producer makes that claim, the standard rises. We are no longer grading a festive entertainer on enthusiasm. We are judging whether a major cinematic interpretation adds anything to a story generations already know.
Scale is useful when it clarifies meaning. It becomes empty when every emotion is inflated to match the visual-effects invoice. Rama’s restraint is difficult to dramatise precisely because modern star cinema equates importance with display. Ravana’s intelligence and ego require more than a slow-motion entrance. Sita cannot be reduced to the dignified centre of male anguish. Lakshmana cannot function only as loyal reaction. The epic survives because its people face choices whose consequences extend beyond spectacle.
Ranbir Kapoor is a gifted actor. I have praised him when the work deserved it and winced when films mistook his wounded-man routine for infinite range. The objection to his casting cannot simply be that he comes from a famous family; careers must ultimately be judged on performance. The larger problem is the industry’s narrowing imagination. When the biggest film arrives, producers once again reach for the handful of bankable names already occupying every marquee. Risk is outsourced to technology while casting remains conservative.
Sai Pallavi interests me more because she brings an unmanufactured screen intelligence. She can hold a close-up without begging the audience to notice the acting. If the film allows Sita interiority rather than ornamental virtue, she may become its centre. But Bollywood publicity has a way of speaking about female characters as powerful while giving the men the decisions, speeches and transformation. I will believe the claim when I see the structure of the film.
Nepotism is not a blood test; it is an allocation system
People often flatten the nepotism debate into a silly question: can a star child be talented? Obviously. Many are. The real issue is how opportunity, failure and reinvention are distributed. An outsider may need one exceptional audition to secure a supporting role. An heir can survive several weak films, change genres, acquire a new image and remain a candidate for the country’s grandest project. Talent exists in both groups; institutional patience does not.
Ramayana is therefore a test of whether familiar casting produces definitive work. If Ranbir gives us a Rama of disciplined strength, emotional clarity and genuine humility, I will say so. If the performance relies on aura created by lighting, music and advance publicity, his surname will not rescue it. The audience is entitled to demand more from the person receiving the largest opportunity.
Yash as Ravana introduces another star system, one built through pan-Indian action cinema. The danger is that Ravana becomes the film’s fashionable antihero because flamboyance is easier to market than restraint. Contemporary blockbusters frequently adore the villain’s swagger even while announcing his moral defeat. Tiwari must resist the trailer-friendly temptation to make evil more dramatically alive than goodness.
The classics understood contrast. In Vijay Bhatt’s devotional cinema and in Ramanand Sagar’s television epic, limitations of technique sometimes produced an unexpected advantage: performers had to create authority through speech, posture and stillness. I am not asking the new film to imitate those rhythms. I am asking it to remember that silence can be cinematic. A digital battlefield cannot compensate for a Rama whose inner life is absent.
The global ambition needs local confidence
Indian filmmakers become nervous when pitching mythology abroad. They either over-explain the culture or package it as exotic spectacle. Ramayana should trust the story’s specificity. Audiences around the world understand exile, loyalty, desire and the misuse of power. They do not need every ritual translated into generic fantasy language. The more confidently Indian the film is, the more universal its human conflicts can become.
Language will be crucial. Hindi mythological dialogue often falls into two bad modes: synthetic Sanskritisation that nobody can inhabit, or casual contemporary speech that dissolves the world. Good writing can achieve clarity without sounding like a dubbed video game. Actors need sentences with rhythm and moral weight. If the dialogue exists mainly to become promotional quotes, the film will age before its second weekend.
Music carries an equally heavy burden. The Ramayana lives in recitation, bhajan, folk performance and regional retellings. A merely loud score would be an artistic failure. The music should recognise that millions approach this material not as intellectual property but through memory and worship. Respect, however, does not require timid imitation. A new composition can be bold if it understands the emotional grammar it is entering.
I also worry about the two-part structure. Splitting an epic can create breathing room, but it can also convert narrative into franchise management. Part One must possess a complete emotional movement rather than functioning as an expensive promise for Part Two. Cinema audiences have become accustomed to endings that are advertisements. The Ramayana deserves an ending that resolves the film before extending the saga.
Judge the film, not the cultural campaign around it
Public discussion will inevitably become political and devotional. Some viewers will treat criticism as disrespect; others will dismiss appreciation as ideological conformity. Both camps make criticism impossible. A film based on a revered text remains a film: performances can be uneven, editing can drag and visual effects can lack texture. Saying so does not diminish the epic. If anything, reverence should produce higher artistic demands.
The makers also deserve protection from frivolous outrage over every design choice. Adaptation requires interpretation. No single visual tradition owns every costume, complexion or palace. Critics should distinguish between meaningful distortion and mere difference from the picture in their heads. Cultural seriousness is not the same as aesthetic policing.
What I will not accept is advance coronation. Box-office bookings, premiere photographs and claims about unprecedented scale tell us that the campaign is effective. They do not tell us whether the film breathes. Bollywood has often mistaken event status for achievement. A work becomes a classic after surviving repeated viewing, not after occupying every premium screen on opening weekend.
Ramayana offers Hindi cinema a rare chance to unite craft, popular emotion and worldwide reach. It also exposes the industry’s habits: concentrated opportunity, worship of scale and dependence on inherited fame. If the film transcends those habits, I will happily celebrate it. If it merely coats them in sacred gold, I will not be bullied by the size of the production.
I want to leave the theatre remembering a moral choice, a glance, a line, perhaps a silence. If I leave remembering only how many creatures occupied the final battle, Bollywood will have spent a fortune to misunderstand abundance. The epic has survived centuries without this film. The film must prove why it deserves a place in the epic’s long afterlife.
