S.S. Rajamouli is the heir apparent to Cecil B. DeMille. His pop-action epics, with their massive set pieces and unabashed theatricality, are virtually unheard of even state-side, where films of this magnitude are shortened and reliant on an abundance of in-universe lore. Prior to RRR, Rajamouli had made a name for himself in the Indian cinema with the Baahubali duology. With The Epic, a director’s edit which combines the previous entries into one behemoth of a Shakespearean opus, he might further cement himself in the global landscape as our greatest living master of spectacle.
A maximalist film which somehow maintains its shocking level of adrenaline despite its nearly four-hour runtime, Baahubali: The Epic is based on Indian folklore as told to Rajamouli as a child. Yet, the shape of the story is immediately recognizable, similar as it is to the Biblical tales of Moses and Ramses. Considering the film’s customary music sequences, it further feels like if The Prince of Egypt was live-action and directed by Ridley Scott, and yet none of that comes to close to encapsulating Rajamouli’s singular artistry.
Baahubali: The Epic Cements S.S. Rajamouli As Cinema’s Greatest Pop Director
Baahubali opens as a young baby is left behind by his mother in a small village underneath cascading waterfalls. There, Sanga (Rohini) raises him into a precocious young adult (Prabhas) whom she names Shivudu. As physically impressive a specimen as Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, Shivudu becomes obsessed with trying to climb the waterfall by leaping from one landing to the next. He fails, repeatedly, but his bouts of superhuman strength are legendary. In one scene, which escalates via Rajamouli’s penchant for thrilling cross-cutting and pulse-pounding music by M.M. Keeravaani, Shivudu lifts a gargantuan lingam and lays it underneath the waterfall so his mother no longer has to make repeated, tiresome treks back and forth to fetch water.
In what almost seems like a dream, Shivudu is visited one day by an ethereal woman who sings to him, luring him up and up until he finally climbs over the top of the waterfall and into the fictional, golden town of Mahishmati. Avantika (Tamannaah Bhatia), to whom he instantly becomes smitten, is part of a resistance movement trying to overthrow the fascistic Bhallaladeva (Rana Daggubati). For reasons as yet unknown to us, Bhallaladeva is holding the princess Devasena (Anushka Shetty) captive, and Avantika’s group is determined to get her back.
It is here that Rajamouli squeezes an edit of the previous films, with the Shivudu/Avantika romance getting almost comically short shrift. Instead of showing us their courtship, the scenes have been cut into a frustratingly off-handed montage that is coupled with expository voiceover, a bizarre technique which happens later as well. Given that the film is already the length that it is, a five-hour, fully intact cut would’ve been preferable.
Regardless, the film moves on with alacrity. Partly to win her love, Shivudu almost single-handedly saves Devasena. In pursuit of her and panicked at the possibility that the legendary Baahubali is not dead, as he had suspected, Bhallaladeva sends his slave general Kattapa (Sathyaraj) and his son, Bhadra (Attivi Sesh) to retrieve his prisoner. But when the two arrive to battle, Shivudu/Baahubali easily decapitates Bhadra, and Kattapa realizes that this is massive man is not Baahubali but his long-lost son. Lots of theatrically performed confusion ensues.
At the risk of divulging too much more, suffice it to say that things get much more complicated from that point on, especially as Rajamouli makes the bold choice to flash back to Baahubali senior’s life, how he met his wife Devasena, and how a battle was borne for the throne between the hero and the eventual tyrant Bhallaladeva. Part two is a race for the heart of the people of Mahishmati, a battle for the soul of a nation, and a tireless pursuit of generations-deep vengeance.
The length of the film is only one reason Rajamouli’s film is so audacious in scope. Its structure is astounding, as the final hour culminates in endless, blood-soaked, gorgeously choreographed battles, compounded by the mountain of backstory we have so carefully been fed for the previous three. In its fearless use of CGI, Rajamouli uses technology not to imitate reality but to expand our conscious understanding of mythology. Baahubali is that rare kind of pop cinema which makes us believe in the possibility of a grander existence.
There are set pieces in the film that go well beyond anything that’s been achieved before in contemporary blockbuster cinema, especially so because of Rajamouli’s embrace of artificiality. It hardly seems to matter whether these are actually superheroes or whether the rules of physics exist here. At one point, Baahubali pilots a ship built like a swan into the clouds as part of the film’s finest musical number, a stunningly romantic duet which solidifies Baahubali and Devasena’s love.
By ignoring conventional ideas of photorealism, Rajamouli leans into the mythopoeic. The film taps into our most grandiose imagination, where imperial cities sit above the clouds and binaries of good and evil can be worked out through the power of solidarity and song. The film’s concluding hour, which inventively both parallels and reverts the first act, solidifies a story about the warped way absolute power corrupts absolutely. If cinema does go the way of the dinosaurs someday, it is at least good to know that the limits of its power are still being tested by the likes of Rajamouli, whose work reaches so far outside the frame it seems to magically reach out of the screen itself, into the audience’s beating heart.