Vineeth Jose

Pazhassi Raja, the movie where the much celebrated trio in Malayalam cinema rejoins to create a magnum-opus. With a record breaking production cost of 35 crores and bringing in stars from all over south India for releasing in four languages makes it one of the the biggest productions in Malayalam.

Pazhassi Raja is an effort worth a lot of appreciation. The biggest and classical hits in Malayalam Industry collects less that 10-15 crores in box-office, so by investing twice the amount in production, the producers are certainly praying for this movie to be received in other languages as well.

The Screenplay, as in any good movie Pazhassi Raja has a good script to hold the 3.5 hour long movie together without much lags. The dialogues in the movie are very dramatized. Even though the storyline is from a real life incident, dramatization of certain scenes slide the movie and gives the feel of a fantasy story.

Cinematography has moments of brilliance. There are some shots all along the movie that are of world class, shots which we have never seen ever before. The color correction done in this has contributed a lot to make the look and feel of the sets more authentic. Most of the VFX shots did really blend in to the scenes and was hardly noticeable. The movie fails in visualizing war scenes and swordfight scenes with grace. It is more of a technical failure, they could have pulled to wires with a bit of perfection to make the physics look real. The most appreciated contribution to the movie is its art direction. Art direction has contributed as much the screenplay to hold this movie together. Background score did excel in the actions sequences and scenes shot in the forest.

The actors have done a really commendable performance. There was not a single scene with anyone performing under. The surprise package comes from Padmapriya who did the role of ‘Neeli’, its her best performance till date and she has managed to set new standards doing actions sequences by woman in Indian cinema. If anything was amazing in the movie, it will be her performance. The songs was good and its visualization tried to do justice to an extend. The makers did manage to bag in the Oscar winning sound engineer Resul Pookutty at the last moment. Unfortunately he couldn’t do what he does best, Live Sync. As Pookutty rightly said this movie should have spend on live sound sync as well, considering the investment in other areas, anyway he did his best and raised the standards of traditional sound mixing a bit in this movie.

Padmapriya, Pazhassi Raja

The efforts and the strain that goes behind a movie that took two long years of filming including locations in forests with multiple star actors and over hundreds of extras bringing an epic to life is something only a real master director can do. Hariharan deserves a lot of credit for visualizing this movie. He has done probably the best and biggest movie in Malayalam in the decade. A bit more effort and investing some more time in pre-visualization could have made this movie a classic. Even thought the director claims this movie as a docu-fiction it is far away from that.

This movie is royal, but not a classic, its massive, not perfect and I personally don’t think this movie as something that will stay on for ever in the viewers heart. Its visually pleasing and comes as an entertainment package.

Pazhassi Raja  gets an  3.5/5

Trivia
*The film released on October 16 with 560 prints out of which 125 were in the original Malayalam version, 100 in Tamil, 100 in Telugu, 110 in Hindi, and another 125 in Hindi with English subtitles for overseas release.
*The movie garnered Rs. 1.53 crores initial on the opening day itself from theatres in Kerala alone, which is a record
*The total budget of the movie is about INR 27 crores (+ 5 Crores extra for scenes Re-shot for SYNC SOUND makes it 32 Crores.)
*The entire movie was filmed in Panavision
*A part of the score was produced at the Hungarian National Philharmonic (Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra), Budapest.
*Wiki Article on Pazhassi Raja – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazhassi_Raja

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