Baahubali: The Beginning (EOTWS)

End Of The Week Shorts #51 extract: Baahubali: The Beginning (2015)

Baahubali is epic, hyper-masculine, super-tacky nonsense. It's good fun. 

To state the obvious, this is rife with highly questionable CGI and some iffy action; the character construction is pretty cheap and the use of the female form is often even cheaper. What's more, this seems to be very concerned with making sure the audience knows that animals weren't harmed in the making - so much so that it will tell us when CGI is in use (sometimes we're even lied to) - but certainly doesn't care about human life; human death is a cornerstone of spectacle here, and I'm pretty sure this holds the world record for mass-blackface. 

That said, some of the action is awesome - though, the best directed scene is undoubtedly a musical number - and the archetypal story makes for a brilliant entertainment. What more is there to be be said other than this is empty-headed fun?