So went to see Baahubali 2 (attached to the sober subtitle of "The conclusion") yesterday. First things first, the projection was shitty as all hell (a third on the screen on the left was darker than the rest, so obviously there was a straight vertinal line at the junction) and the subtitling was a rushed job (mistakes, a few isolated sentences in english, a couple of places with formatting error and the TC appearing on screen).
Also holy Jesus fucking Christ at that "commercial partners" (a solid 90 seconds of logos for the licensing, music, beverages, chocolates) preroll.
I thought I mentioned the first film here but can't locate the message, so here comes : Baahubali is a "Tollywood" (Telugu spoken productions, based in the city of Hyderabad) fantasy epic about a very nice, very strong & very just young man lured away of his modest home by love & destiny and who, alongs the way, discover he's the son of a hero and rightful heir to a rich and civilized kingdom currently under the yoke of his cruel uncle. By the end of the first film, he's given a pretty comprehensive flashback to his father's story and incredible accomplishments. So comprehensive in fact that the flashback runs through the second film for 4/5 of the runtime (I actually kind of forgot we were still in it).
The first film borrows a lot to post-300 fantasy aesthetics from Hollywood though there's probably some influence from China too (the sheer mind boggling quantity of extras and props reminded a bit of the better ones, likes Red Cliff). In this one they're straight up making their own (better !) version of the Two Towers. Both films are fairly light on the singing part, there's only a handful (maybe 2-3 ?) choreography numbers for each. Just saying for those who don't like them.
It's very VFX heavy and while it's sometimes crude in places I'd say it's actually quite a bit better than some of the excerpts of bid budget Chinese films I saw recently. Overall I found this second part even better than the first one. Excellent pacing (it's nearly 3 hours even in the shortened "international" version), better comedic bits (Baahubali Senior plays dumb to infiltrate the entourage of the princess he's in love with, toying with the vain, arrogant, harmless buffoon/cousin and attributing him his feats), utterly over the top action with beefy dudes and crazy visuals. We're making fun of "canon" and "lore" in that other thread and Baahubali dispenses itself of all his filler for the better :
*Hero finds scores of innocent people floating dead in a river*
"Oh yeah, there's a nomadic warring tribe who likes to do that roaming the region".
*30mn later*
"City is under attack !"
"It's nomadic warring tribe who likes to drown people !"
And that's pretty much it.
There's a point at the end where the action gets too much even within the context of an unbridled Indian epic but still a very enjoyable two-parter for me. It's maybe not the most sophisticated film of its kind but the Indian propensity to go for direct and sincere films is helping it a lot over similar US films.
