Their chemistry is palpable, and the two undoubtedly pretty protagonists do well to keep the heat alive through their every on-screen interaction.
JODHA AKBAR FULL MOVIE MOVIE
The movie is a treat in the inventive scenes where Jodhaa (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) stands up to Akbar, the Rajput princess in no way ready to yield without a fight. The film has a good and solid heart, and the story, of a conquering, defiant young king - this one really was meant to be princeling for a while longer - taking a bride for strategic reasons and then falling helplessly in love with her unbridled spirit, is a winner. They might have worked if shown in fits and spurts, swords thrust strongly in rapidly edited montages set to a peaking score, but here we are shown long and tiresome battle sequences - scenes where we see extras twirling weapons and jabbing the air pointlessly.
Soldiers charge at each other visibly trying to hold back, and while I'm sure hundreds or thousands of extras are impossible to control, the battle sequences are amateurish to an embarrassing extreme. The director can handle romance and emotional conversations well, as we are well aware, and war is just not his forte. There is no air of urgency, and no surprise as the antagonists - from rivals to elephants - obediently fall over, on cue.Īnd the falling is, unfortunately, sloppy. But palace intrigue and dramatic conspiracy can be cinematic and entertaining without having to be simplistic and even banal.
JODHA AKBAR FULL MOVIE LICENSE
The best historicals have little to do with the truth, and let's just give a filmmaker benefit of doubt and the license to have his own interpretation of a period with varied chronicles. I'm not even going to touch on fact and fiction.
(The latter is exhibited best in the close-ups and the abruptly cacophonic background score.) Hence the romance works, but the history, well, seems to be getting laboriously in the way.
In contrast to the well-handled moments between Jodhaa and Akbar, the rest of the film seems contrived and weighed down - both by a pressing need to live up to scale as well as the director's undeniable soap-opera sensibilities. But the royal intrigue is predictable, the characters obvious and underwritten. Again, there is no fundamental problem with this, provided the action within has some substance, or at least style. 'These are my sets, see how they glisten,' the director seems to croon as he shows off big rooms and elaborate costumes. This film works when treated as a simple, compelling romance between an unlikely wedded couple, but outside of it, Gowariker falls prey to all the big-budget trappings. He is a fine director, no question, and while there is no scene in this film that makes you cringe, there is much waste. That doesn't mean, however, that we thus go overboard the tragic way Ashutosh does. Historicals, it can almost be said, deserve an extra hour of running time. Heck, Spartacus was longer and Mughal-E-Azam only a trifle shorter, and both 1960 releases hit immortality. It's just not great and - despite the daunting three and a half hour length - it could well have been. if only the entire film was made with such restraint.ĭon't get me wrong, Jodhaa Akbar is not a bad film at all. It is a strong, well-performed scene, telling a tale and insightfully revealing a character by a mere gesture, a showing of mood. Wordlessly, he leaves his throne and joins the dervishes as they whirl, gracefully entering into the trance with feckless fervour. Hrithik Roshan, playing the Emperor of Hindustan, watches this with first bemusement and then, curiousity. Each of them sounding suspiciously like AR Rahman, the minstrels break into the touching Khwaja Mere Khwaja and take the track to an almost trance-like happiness, the two backup singers even looking nearly identical. The titular couple's wedding banns have just taken place, and a group of singers sit cross-legged to offer the lord tribute. I n Ashutosh Gowariker's Jodhaa Akbar, there is a particularly outstanding song sequence that must be praised.
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