Robot or Enthiran was a film that took the South Indian film industry by storm with Rajnikanth, also known as the’God of Kollywood’ portraying a double role of a scientist and his robotic invention. Director Shankar brought about a kind of revolution by introducing a new theme of Robots exhibiting human qualities and possibly threatening the existence of the human race, on the negative side.
The sequel 2.0 takes the track to an altogether new level with the once dismantled’Chitti’ finally brought back to life upon the threat of a very powerful and deadly foe.
Plot:-
The movie begins with a group of young enthusiastic students planning to visit Dr Vaseegaran(Rajnikanth) at his laboratory upon hearing his invention of a new robot.They are greeted by’Nila’(Amy Jackson)who catches the attention of one of the students only to realise a few minutes later that Nila is a humanoid robot, (acronym of Nice Intelligent Lovely Assistant) designed by Vaseegaran which exhibits human qualities and emotions.
Sometime later, one of the students’ mobile phone gets flung in the air exhibiting avian characteristics. Before long, cell phones all over Chennai city began mysteriously dissapearing into the air.
Things start taking an ugly turn when all the disappeared cell phones which had assembled together at a landfill were picked up by a huge dump truck and then, as if they had an agenda of their known, escaped and headed straight towards a mobile phone dealer’s house and eventually kills him. The next day, Dr Vaseegaran and Neela along with the Police and Investigation team realise that there was a mysterious force behind the disappearance of all the mobile phones from the city and the killings and the tracker traces all the mobile phones to a landfill in a nearby town.There they realise that the phones had taken the form of a huge bird and was attempting to destroy mobile phone towers while wreaking havoc on civilians and soldiers alike.
This prompted Dr Vaseegaran to request to bring back the dismantled Chitti, which was heavily objected by Mr Dhirendra Bohra, a brilliant scientist who was the son of the deceased Dr Bohra(Danny Denzongpa) who had planted a destruction programming chip in Chitti earlier.
It was not until the killing of an important minister that the CM decides to give the go ahead to reinstall Chitti to tackle this deadly force. Vaseegaran, through Chitti realises that the bird had an aura of negative energy(whom Dr Vaseegaran had termed as the 5th force) and the transmitters which repelled the bird had positive energy . It is slowly revealed that the force behind all the mayhem through the city was a deceased bird lover named Pakshirajan(Akshay Kumar) an ornithologist, who wanted to seek vengeance upon all mobile phone users due to the rapid decline of the avian population.
The film goes into a flashback displaying Pakshirajan’s immense love for birds and his utter disregard for mobile users & companies as they were solely responsible for the decline in the Avian population, due to the high intensity radiation emitted by these devices & towers. He holds roadside protests, speaks to the telecom minister & the company chief, but all in vain.Frustrated, he decides to hang himself & his spirit coupled with all the deceased spirits of the birds takes the form of the 5th force.
Later, Dhirendra Bohra decides to revive the 5th force which was neutralised by Vasigaran, which would once again wreak havoc throughout the city, This prompts Vaseegaran to bring back Chitti’s destructive form with the help of Nila.
Will Chitti be successful in repelling off the even more powerful 5th force or will the 5th force eventually succeed in its nefarious designs?
Direction/Performances/Others:-
Coming to the crux of the movie, the Direction, Shankar has taken the Animation & Cinematography, more than anything else, to the next level. Animation, more precisely VFX and animatronics was used extensively in almost all action packed sequences as well as most importantly, portraying the great evil 5th force wreaking havoc and destruction over the city and people.
Both the Screenplay and Cinematography were’Z’ level in the movie.The scenes were very well & precisely executed overall throughout the movie, not leaving a boring moment for the viewer.
Rajnikanth comes back with a bang again as Professor Waseegaran and as "Chitti". His new robot invention and assistant named as "Nila" was played by Amy Jackson.This time however, Chitti’s role was exclusively positive in fighting the evil "5th force" despite him later re-engineered by Waseegaran and Nila to take the form of the negative Chitti as portrayed in the earlier film, for the same purpose. Also to note, his third avatar as the miniature’Kutty version" revealed the same jovial personality of the robot imparted by the negative Chitti.
Besides Rajnikanth, Akshay Kumar had a very pivotal and outstanding role as a villain, but this is the very rare kind of Cinema villains, who turns negative or evil due to the unforeseen circumstances in their lives.Nevertheless, the film did not condone this evil despite the events leading upto them being clearly portrayed.
Amy Jackson portrayed quite a realistic image of a robot having human qualities.Named as "Nila", she was crucial in redesigning Chitti in his destructive form as per Waseegaran’s instructions in order to battle the evil force.
Other characters, though brief were played well by the respective actors, such as Sudhanshu Pandey as the scientist Dhirendra Bohra, whose aim was to avenge his father’s death by destroying Waseegaran as he assumed Waseegaran to be behind his father’s death. Other characters such as Adil Hussain as the Home Minister S Vijay Kumar, Kalabhavan Shajohn as minister Vaira Moorthy, Anant Mahadevan as the Head of the meeting or Kaizaad Kotwal as the businessman Manoj Lulla were also done well.
One thing notable about the movie was that unlike any other Bollywood or Kollywood movie or even its precursor Robot/Enthiran, this movie did not have any songs being filmed on the actors, maybe a Hollywood influence here.
Overall, Robot 2.0 was a masterpiece in itself, be it the performances, cinematography, animation or CGI, all of them were very precisely crafted and well executed to bring in a Sci-fi sort of a film, which does have a crucial message of’Environment conservation’ which is conveyed to the audiences.