I went into Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana: Part 1 wanting it to succeed for a reason that has little to do with box-office nationalism. Hindi cinema has spent too long confusing scale with acreage: a few aerial shots, a digital army, actors walking in slow motion and a publicity figure large enough to frighten accountants. Tiwari’s film, released on November 5 with Ranbir Kapoor, Sai Pallavi and Yash at the centre of its formidable ensemble, at least understands that an epic needs a coherent world. The sets, landscapes, costumes and effects are not apologizing for ambition. As The Guardian’s review listing noted, the production arrives as an enormous large-scale undertaking. My reservation is that technical conviction sometimes becomes a substitute for interpretive courage. We know this story. The film’s task is not to inform us what happens. It is to make the familiar feel morally alive.
Reverence can become a dramatic sedative
Any filmmaker adapting the Ramayana enters a room already crowded with faith, memory, television imagery, regional tellings and political argument. Caution is understandable. It is also dangerous. When every scene is treated as an icon awaiting worship, characters stop surprising us. They become beautifully lit certainties. The great strength of the epic is not that everyone is simple; it is that duty makes painful demands on people who experience love, pride, fear and doubt. A film that reduces those tensions to immaculate poses may avoid offence, but it also avoids drama.
Tiwari is strongest when he lets performers occupy the silence between declarations. Sai Pallavi has an instinctive presence that resists ornamental treatment; she suggests intelligence even when the screenplay is busy arranging grandeur around her. Ranbir Kapoor’s restraint works when it conveys discipline under pressure, though the film occasionally photographs serenity until it becomes an advertising concept. Yash brings weight without needing the camera to announce it every few seconds. These are actors capable of contradiction. I wanted the script to trust them more and the score to explain them less.
The star system meets characters larger than stars
Bollywood’s modern epic has a casting problem. Producers want famous faces because budgets require opening weekends, yet mythology contains figures who must exceed the actors playing them. The publicity cycle pulls in the opposite direction: posters become a roll call of celebrities, transformation anecdotes replace textual choices, and every entrance risks feeling like a fan event. This film mostly controls that impulse, but not entirely. There are moments when I see the performer’s brand arrive a second before the character.
I do not object to stars. The classics were full of them. I object to the current industry habit of treating casting as achievement completed. A surname, a body transformation and a devotional poster are not performances. Bollywood has spent years promoting inherited familiarity as talent, then acting puzzled when audiences become skeptical. Here, the principal cast largely earns its space, which makes the film a useful rebuke to nepotism’s lazier form. Prestige cannot be inherited from the source material either. The Ramayana does not automatically confer greatness on the adaptation. Every scene must still work.
At last, visual effects serve geography
The film’s most encouraging achievement is spatial clarity. Too many Indian spectacles use digital effects to make images bigger while making action harder to understand. Tiwari and his collaborators generally establish where people are, what separates them and why movement matters. The world has texture rather than the frictionless sheen of a game trailer. That sounds like faint praise until one remembers how often expensive Hindi films have failed at basic visual geography.
The industry context matters. The week’s release schedules identified Ramayana as the dominant Hindi theatrical attraction, with ET Now’s roundup noting its November 5 arrival amid a crowded streaming week. A film occupying this much cultural and commercial space should advance the craft, not merely dominate screens. On design, effects integration and confidence, it does. If its success persuades producers to fund preparation rather than last-minute digital repair, Hindi cinema will benefit.
Length is not the enemy; repetition is
The running time will attract complaints, some deserved. I have no ideological objection to a long film. I love classics that take their time because duration can create social worlds and emotional accumulation. The problem begins when length is used to certify importance. Ramayana sometimes repeats an emotion in dialogue, music and image, as though one of the three might fail an inattentive viewer. A glance becomes a speech; the speech receives a crescendo; the crescendo is followed by a reaction shot. Grandeur needs rhythm, including the confidence to stop underlining.
The two-part structure creates another temptation: to treat the first film as installation. Franchises have taught audiences to accept unfinished architecture as narrative. I resist that bargain. A first part may leave events unresolved, but it must possess a complete emotional movement. Tiwari comes closer than many franchise filmmakers because the moral trajectory is clear, yet several passages feel designed to place pieces for later rather than generate urgency now. I should not have to pre-order catharsis.
The adaptation needed a sharper point of view
What is this Ramayana specifically arguing? That question is harder to answer than it should be. The film honors duty, sacrifice and righteous conduct, but those are broad inheritances from the epic. An adaptation becomes distinctive through emphasis. Does it see power as a test of self-command? Does it foreground exile as political education? Does it examine how public duty imposes private cruelty? Does it understand Sita as the story’s moral intelligence rather than its sanctified object? The film touches several possibilities without choosing one firmly enough.
I understand the commercial calculation. In a polarized culture, specificity can be recoded as offence. A huge production has investors, global markets and communities of expectation. Safe reverence becomes financially rational. But art made to avoid every interpretive dispute risks becoming ceremony. India has countless Ramayanas precisely because the story has been retold, localized, argued with and loved from different angles. Fidelity is not a single locked room. A confident film could acknowledge multiplicity while remaining deeply respectful.
Counterargument: perhaps shared grandeur is the point
Many viewers will reasonably say that they came not for revision but for recognition on a scale Hindi cinema has rarely attempted. They want families to see a foundational story rendered with beauty, sincerity and technical polish. On those terms, the film delivers a great deal. There is value in communal theatrical experience, especially when streaming has fragmented audiences into private niches. I felt the room respond to images and relationships it already knew. Familiarity was not a weakness for them; it was the source of emotion.
I accept that response and do not regard popular reverence as intellectually inferior. My criticism is that shared recognition and interpretive depth are not enemies. The best popular epics provide both. They satisfy the viewer who knows every turn while revealing a tension that had remained hidden in plain sight. Tiwari’s film achieves this intermittently, especially through performance, but retreats too often into immaculate illustration.
Bollywood should learn the right lesson
If Ramayana becomes a major success, the industry will imitate its least reproducible features. We will hear announcements of giant mythological universes, expensive casts and release dates several festivals away. Producers will assume the lesson is that audiences want mythology. I think the better lesson is that audiences reward visible preparation. They notice when a world has been designed, action has been planned and effects have been integrated rather than pasted over panic. Those practices would improve a crime drama or comedy as surely as an epic.
The wrong lesson would be to chase sanctified intellectual property while continuing to neglect writing. A known story is not a screenplay. A famous actor is not a character. A digital horizon is not awe. Bollywood’s crisis has never been a shortage of money or ancestral material; it has been the habit of treating both as substitutes for choices.
I recommend seeing Ramayana: Part 1 in a cinema because its visual and sonic conception belongs there. I admired much of it, was moved by portions and wished throughout that the filmmakers trusted complexity as much as scale. It is not the hollow monument I feared, nor quite the living classic its ambition seeks. It proves Hindi cinema can build an epic world. Part 2 must prove it can interrogate one.
