Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma has returned to Nitesh Tiwari’s “Ramayana: Rise of a Legend” for a second viewing, and his verdict has only hardened. Writing on X after the repeat watch, Varma—who describes himself as an atheist—took care to separate his reading from devotion. “This analysis is from a film watcher and not as a ram bhakt,” he wrote, arguing that reviewers who praise the film’s scale but then add caveats are missing the point.
His central claim is that the film’s size is the point. Where critics have said the soul is missing or the music could be better, Varma contended that “the soul is in the scale and the emotion is in the humongous ambition” of the people behind the production. He credited director Nitesh Tiwari and producer Namit Malhotra with achieving what Indian cinema had not previously attempted, and singled out the opening cosmic battle, Ravana’s ten heads, the forest landscapes and the climactic Jatayu sequence as more than effects.
The performances under the spectacle
The strongest praise was reserved for Yash’s Ravana. Varma called it “not a performance of the year, but … of many decades,” and argued that the character is written as a man who has earned power through penance and intelligence rather than as a conventional villain. In his reading, the film makes Ravana the gravitational centre: “In short there’s no Rama without Ravana.”
He also defended Ranbir Kapoor’s restrained Ram against criticism that the actor held one expression through the film. For Varma, the underplaying is essential: Ram’s authority comes from composure and principle, and that stillness is what makes the character the counterweight to the story’s worldliness. The length, he added, was necessary to give Ravana’s stature and Ram’s exile their weight.
- Yash’s Ravana: praised as a once-in-decades blend of clarity and force.
- Ranbir Kapoor’s Ram: defended as a controlled counterweight, not a blank performance.
- Nitesh Tiwari’s direction: credited for refusing a masala shortcut.
A new benchmark, argued loudly
Varma went further than performance talk. He described the film as the first Indian production that could stand above large-scale Hollywood fantasy without copying it, saying it digs into “its own rich Indian backyard” instead of borrowing the language of The Lord of the Rings or Avatar. He called the result “this mountainous Taj Mahal of cinema,” and was scathing about negative notices: “The negative reviewers are looking at a mountain and complaining that the path is steep.”
For Hindi cinema watchers, this is more than another rave. It is a claim about where Indian spectacle sits in the global pecking order, and a prediction that films released after 5 November will be judged against Ramayana: Part 1. The debate it sets off—whether scale can carry an epic when audiences feel the music or storytelling should do more—will likely outlast the news cycle.
Source: The Times of India
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