Metal storm: "Kalki 2898 A.D."

Kalki 2898 A.D. is the Indian film industry turning itself into a machine - ideally, a machine to print the kind of money Indian films haven't been making in the course of the past few years. Though reportedly the most expensive film in Indian history, Nag Ashwin's exercise in escapist worldbuilding - announcing the launch of a so-called "Kalki Cinematic Universe" - has been fabricated largely from scrap metal: the spare parts of Dune, Blade Runner, Mad Max and the Star Wars series, residual nuts and bolts of Hindu scripture, and in its more thoughtful moments, few and far between though they are, sheets of Gattaca and The Handmaid's Tale. Everywhere you look, this multi-million-rupee recycling plant melds mythology, movie and metallurgy. Its primary location, for starters, is a series of interlocking, Escher-etching gantries on the edge of a vast desert wasteland, where rich and poor are segregated and women are valued exclusively for their fertility. Our hero Bhairava (the burly Prabhas, from Baahubali) is a dozy, goofy bounty hunter, basically Han Solo in an Iron Man suit. Several of his foes, meanwhile, the ones who really do look as if they've drifted over from George Miller's Fury Road, appear to have had their weapons welded onto their hands, like characters in one of Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo films. The battle being fought over these three hours is the usual one, between the forces of good and evil, yet Kalki most often looks to be fighting a battle that speaks to where movies the whole planet over are at right now: between humanity and logistics. The final result is the movie equivalent of one of those confounding, chaotic, all-bets-are-off high-scoring draws you occasionally witness on a football pitch. Extra time will be necessary to decide the ultimate winner. Penalties of one form or another may also be required.

True, the prologue, featuring a fully computer-generated Amitabh Bachchan, is less than promising. (Humanity goes one-nil down in the opening seconds.) Yet Kalki is often unexpected, and sometimes just plain weird, in a way the ploddingly rational and painstakingly planned worldbuilding of Villeneuve's Dunes, hamstrung by near-religious devotion to their source, simply wouldn't allow for. Though much of it is scrap and some of it just junk, those elements look to have been inserted within an overall superstructure that presents as largely improvised, moveable, made up. Most of the film's strengths and weaknesses can be traced back to the writing, and more specifically to Ashwin's resistance to exposition. After three hours, we're no closer to knowing where this world is (be it a future Earth, another planet entirely or some mythological third space), nor how everybody got here. What we're left watching is a succession of eyepopping sets populated by pan-Indian stars driven here on golf carts, extraordinary images that never marry up much. As visions go, Kalki is altogether unanchored. Yet this frees Ashwin to surprise or simply throw stuff at the audience. A stargate opens, and a giant tiger (possibly on loan from the RRR boys) emerges. An early action sequence turns into an airborne ballet. The Big Bad of this universe is revealed as a Rupert Murdoch-like wraith (the great Kamal Haasan, squeezed into thinning latex clingfilm, like deli sausage) who exists in a Lynchian flotation tank, from where he harvests uterine matter to bolster his personal reserves of anti-aging serum. Just when you think Ashwin is getting at the misogynist extremes of the patriarchy, along comes a scene of lowish comedy featuring Disha Patani in hot pants as the Lara Croft type Bhairava is boinking. For long stretches, there barely seems to be anyone in control of the machine, which at least makes a change from the deadening iron fists of certain wildly overpraised movie visionaries; the material gets reassembled in a different order, or tossed up in the air and left to see where it falls.

Going AWOL very quickly is any notion of intelligent design: it's raining junk, and maybe Kalki's best hope is that some of its freefalling debris - a rusting plot point, say, or a clanking reference to an even bigger and better Hollywood film - induces brain damage in the viewer. That way, at least, we wouldn't notice the peculiar mismatches in performance style. Prabhas goes about Bhairava with a massy-hero smugness that may be pitched at fans only; he's one of those Chosen Ones where you begin to wonder if there hasn't been a terrible mix-up at head office. Deepika Padukone, who's had to do a lamentable amount of onscreen suffering since reaching the height of her profession, plays her disputed baby-carrier Sumathi as if she were in hard sci-fi with Something Serious to Say about feminism. Meanwhile, the icon Bachchan, playing a dusty immortal with a hole in his forehead, has been paired with a sparky street kid who looks like he's about to get the old geezer to appear in his next TikTok video. Ashwin has a laudable fondness for schlubby, stubbly character actors to bulk out his womb-hassling cabals, but set this universe against the properly complex allegiances built up over the course of Mani Ratnam's recent Ponniyin Selvan spectacles - real movie art, where this is antsy, restless commerce - these characters retain all the heft of Playmobil figurines. It's not just that the film's tropes have been half-inched from diverse sources, the people playing them out seem to come from different movies: I half-expected Mel Brooks to show up as a street vendor, haggling over the price of chai. All of which is not to say Kalki is unenjoyable. It is fun to see an incredibly expensive machine that appears to be malfunctioning, doing things it's not meant to (tickling an audience, rather than hammering us into awed submission) in ways we can't fully predict. Yet the enjoyment Kalki elicits is much the same as that one gets from reading about Elon Musk's Cybertrucks. You can well imagine Ashwin's movie careening off the cinema screen and smashing into an adjacent wall at high speed; I was amazed it carried me as far as it did without throwing me entirely clear.

Kalki 2898 A.D. is now playing in selected cinemas.