What even are Telugu movies anymore? You add a religious segment, some good VFX, and decent acting, and people call it “very good.” Take Mirai, it’s not all that. It’s very much average and not worth the hype. But here’s the bigger question: Why are directors choosing this path? Why make movies that lean so heavily on mythological imagery, gods, and plain bhakti instead of being creative?
You can take movies like Brahmastra or Kanappa or Kantara, or the to be released movie of Ramayana. Oh sure, you can even take RRR for this example. Although you can say Rajamouli executed his story in a much more compelling way compared to his counterparts, it still is a very overused idea.
But reality is that whatever they are cooking is selling, and that’s because our audience hasn’t improved. Where is the emotional thinking we humans are supposed to have? We definitely might’ve dropped it on the way looking for more gods to worship. Years of regular normie movies and directors have decided that more mediocre movies is the way to go, they definitely have become lazy.
Stepping away from the religious segment, you have routine movies, with routine scripts, routine acting, routine everything. Now you might call me out to be a retreatist, for just completely downright disagreeing with everything, which I might be too, but you can’t just tell me I’m wrong.
Mallu movies are really the only type of movies I look forward to nowadays. They rarely miss, and they are highly ambitious. I really love their down to earth storytelling of characters, and how everyone who acts in the movie are actors, and not self glorified demigods. I really, really hope our other southern counterparts take up the fresh ideas they get and get to work. By that I don’t mean remaking those movies, because we all know how that went.
Perhaps it’s not our fault: maybe it is the fault of how the world has been presented to us. We grew up in mediocrity, so we find mediocrity all right. There’s an old saying that maybe it’s not the seed’s fault, but the surroundings and how the seed grew up.
Media has changed the perception of how we are thinking right now, and if anything, we are slowly evolving backwards. And by media I mean all media from newspapers to books. The shows that are releasing nowadays are supposed to be futuristic, but really? Are we though?
You all know the movie Back to the Future, where we look at 2020 as a huge new world, full of very cool inventions but where are we right now? A slowly aging, dying out world with hundreds of new diseases and narcissistic individuals.
Would you as a child grow up to live in the present world right now? I definitely wouldn’t. Kid me would’ve said “future all the way,” but adult me says go back as far as you can and never come back. I’m definitely scared to live in the present, and the future makes me feel worse.
I’ve never been an escapist, but I definitely might be one now. I do not want to stick around waiting for the future to come and hit me right in my chest as I go flying like those cheap villains in action movies.