The opening frame of Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana: Rise of a Legend doesn’t begin with a prayer, it begins with a transaction. Ravana, drenched in ash and desperation, offers his own blood to Brahma in exchange for the power to free his people.
It is a startlingly political cold-open for a mythological epic, one that promises a revisionist reading of the Ramayana. That promise, frustratingly, is the only thing this first instalment fully delivers.
When A Villain’s Liberation Becomes A Conqueror’s Vengeance
Yash’s Ravana is introduced not as a monster but as a community organiser. He petitions the Devas for his enslaved Asura clan; when refused, he turns to violence with the cold calculus of a man who has exhausted diplomacy.
This ideological origin is the film’s most radical gesture. It reframes the Ramayana’s central antagonist as a decoloniser whose noble cause curdles into despotism, and Yash plays the transformation with a stillness that is genuinely unnerving.
Yet the screenplay, which carries no verified writer credit in the public record, treats this complexity as a launchpad rather than a study. By the second hour, Ravana’s liberationist rhetoric collapses into generic world-domination monologues that feel borrowed from a dozen Hollywood villains.
The Divine Incarnation That Feels Like An Afterthought
Ranbir Kapoor’s Rama enters the narrative with all the dramatic urgency of a royal census entry. He is dutiful, soft-spoken, and visually resplendent in gold-threaded dhotis, but the film gives him almost no interiority to play.
Where the actor’s work in Toxic weaponised his boyish charm into something feral, here he is asked to embody virtue without friction. The result is a performance of extraordinary stillness that the screenplay mistakes for depth.
Sai Pallavi’s Sita fares slightly better, largely because the actress brings a watchful intelligence to her limited screen time. In the marriage sequence, she holds Rama’s gaze a beat longer than decorum allows, a small, human rebellion that the film never returns to.
The supporting ensemble, including Ravi Dubey’s Lakshman and Arun Govil’s Dashrath, functions as ornamental royalty. They speak when spoken to, weep when required, and vanish into the palace architecture without leaving a dent.
A Fantasy Epic That Forgets To Be Intimate
Tiwari, who built his reputation on the grounded emotional precision of Dangal, seems overwhelmed by the scale he has been handed. The camera swoops over Lanka’s obsidian towers and Ayodhya’s marble courtyards with impressive technical polish, but rarely lingers on a face long enough to register feeling.
The film’s visual language owes more to the CG-laden spectacle of Geriga than to any devotional tradition. When Hanuman, voiced by Anupam Kher in a brief but resonant turn, finally appears, he is rendered as a CGI colossus whose emotional register is entirely in the sound mix.
Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman’s score is the film’s most reliable asset, though it is deployed with a sledgehammer’s subtlety. Every divine revelation arrives with a choral swell so emphatic that it preempts the audience’s own awe.
The editing rhythm betrays the two-part structure most brutally. The first half races through cosmic mythology with the breathlessness of a trailer compilation, while the second half slows to a processional crawl as Rama and Sita’s exile begins.
The Two-Part Gamble That Withholds Its Own Climax
Here is the film’s most consequential structural decision: it ends not on a cliffhanger but on a shrug. Rama, Sita, and Lakshman walk into the forest; Ravana broods in Lanka; the credits roll.
International audiences lured by the subtitle “Rise of a Legend” will be forgiven for expecting a complete arc. Instead, they receive a 165-minute prologue that treats the actual Ramayana, the abduction, the war, the triumph, as a sequel’s problem.
The comparison to Manithee is instructive. That film, for all its narrative waywardness, understood that fantasy audiences need a self-contained emotional resolution even within a franchise framework. This one offers only deferred gratification.
The Studio Balance Sheet And The Remake Economy
Prime Focus Studios, DNEG, and Yash’s Monster Mind Creations have staked approximately ₹4, 000 crore on this two-part gamble, a figure that makes the film’s opening weekend a referendum on Indian exhibition’s capacity for premium mythological spectacle.
The release strategy, a Diwali-week bow across five languages plus an English-dubbed international cut, signals that the producers are chasing the diaspora dollar with the same aggression that Marvel once deployed. But the film’s PG-13 rating and CGI-heavy aesthetic risk alienating the devotional audiences who made earlier Ramayana adaptations into television rituals.
Yash’s co-producer credit and scene-stealing performance raise an uncomfortable question for the franchise: has the villain become more commercially viable than the hero? If the second instalment leans further into Ravana’s perspective, it may find a more coherent film, and a more bankable star.
This ambitious mythological swing arrives at a moment when contemporary Hindi fantasys are testing whether spectacle can sustain a theatrical ecosystem decimated by streaming. The answer, at least for this first chapter, is that scale without closure is merely expensive foreplay.
The Uncomfortable Verdict: A Prologue In Search Of A Movie
Ramayana: Rise of a Legend is not a failure of craft, it is a failure of nerve. Tiwari and his team have built a visually staggering, ideologically ambitious world, then refused to let it breathe as a standalone story.
Yash’s Ravana will linger in the memory longer than anything else here: a man who wanted to free his people and became the very tyrant he despised. That tragedy is the film’s beating heart, and it is buried under three hours of exposition for a sequel that may never justify the wait.
When the credits finally roll, the audience is left holding a beautifully rendered promise. The Ramayana deserves better than to be treated as a pilot episode.
