Nagabandham promises a fantasy treasure hunt adventure but ultimately devolves into a senselessly violent and shallow revenge saga, laments Sreeju Sudhakaran.
Key Points
- Nagabandham begins as a fantasy treasure hunt but quickly shifts to relentless violence and ethno-religious nationalism.
- Despite initial visual ambition and engaging twists, the narrative crumbles in the second half, losing its sense of adventure.
- Virat Karrna cannot rescue a film that mistakes relentless onscreen violence and religious rhetoric for compelling storytelling.
Nagabandham, directed by Abhishek Nama, is a deceptive film.
It promises a fantasy treasure hunt with mythological flavours. And that certainly makes the film arresting in the first half, at least.
But that illusion is brutally shattered when Nagabandham devolves into a senseless rhythm of violence and religious dog-whistling that makes you question why filmmakers these days keep resorting to cashing in on majoritarian sentiments when they have nothing else to fall back on.
Or is it our fault that we have been so blinded by our ideologies that everything is being packaged and sold to us in that manner? Extremely dangerous kind of demand-and-supply cycle we are living in.
The Weak Promise of A Captivating Treasure Hunt
Nagabandham begins with two archaeologists, a Britisher, Tesla (Jason Shah), who has nothing to do with Elon Musk’s Tesla, and Zulfikar (Rishabh Sawhney, too one-note) who enter a hidden cave.
A mysterious entity called Bairagi (Garuda Ram) mentally manipulates Zulfikar and makes him realise he is the reincarnation of Afghan invader Ahmed Shah Abdali.
Tesla escapes from the cave with something, and in a scene straight out of Roland Emmerich’s 2012, he visits his mentor Dr Prabhakar (Jagapathi Babu, quite in his trademark mould) at a cultural summit and demands time with the Indian prime minister.
Except he is not here to warn about the end of the world, but to reveal that he has in his possession Nagabandham, a book that leads to the hidden temple of Virata Purushan, whose treasures could make India much richer.
There is a sense of warped irony that the sole British character in the film is shown thinking about how to make India richer, while the characters belonging to a specific community are portrayed as bloodthirsty barbarians.
But at this point, the ideological intention of the film was still not very clear to me. So I still held on to the hope that Nagabandham could turn out to be a decent enough treasure hunt adventure.
Alas, three hours later, those hopes were broken, buried and composted by the film’s utter lack of ambition in that regard.
The Tale of Rudra
Okay, back to the plot.
The good Britisher’s track is violently wrapped up, and we move to a different part of the country where we meet Rudra (Virat Karrna), an orphaned young man raised by a kind-hearted family. He adores his adoptive sister Manasa (Soniya Singh) and is desperate to earn enough money to conduct her wedding in grand fashion.
So he accepts the offer to guide a group of villains to a forbidden place called Bhairavakona. They are searching for the Brahmakamalam, an artefact stolen from the nearby Sringapuram temple (modelled after Kerala’s Ananthapadmanabha Swamy temple), but got lost after their plane crashed in the region.
The goons belong to Zulfikar and Bairagi, who need the Brahmakamalam to access the hidden chamber inside the Virata Purushan temple. Well, after some fracas, Rudra ends up meeting Parvathi (Nabha Natesh, decent), who is also in search of the Brahmakamalam.
Meanwhile, the villains, desperate to get their hands on the artefact, decide to embrace extreme violence to achieve their goal.
Senseless, Numbing Violence
It is perfectly fine to use mythology and gods as the foundation for a fantasy adventure, and for most of its first half, Nagabandham genuinely feels like it is on the right track. The screenplay throws in enough twists and turns to keep the narrative moving through its elaborate set-pieces.
There is certainly ambition in the film’s visual design. Sure, the sets often look artificial, the VFX rarely convinces, and even for a film titled Nagabandham, there are perhaps one CGI snake too many. But there is still a sense of scale to several sequences, particularly the Sringapuram temple song, that make the move visually binding to some extent.
Virat Karrna feels colourless as a protagonist in the initial portions, but the story around him remains engaging until the Bhairavakona stretch (where CGI snakes are joined by their reptilian cousins, CGI crocs), so that didn’t matter much. Unfortunately, just when he begins settling into the role, the film starts crumbling around him.
The first major signs appear after Rudra and Parvathi’s romantic encounter. Nagabandham immediately inserts a sensuous, romantic number to create an instant noodle love story, only to follow it up, after barely another conversation, with a celebratory wedding song.
Just when you begin wondering why a film already stretching its runtime needs back-to-back songs, Nagabandham abruptly abandons both the romance and the adventure to descend into relentless violence.
Almost every secondary character is butchered in a single extended sequence purely so the hero can have his divine awakening.
I couldn’t help but think, if that awakening is meant to turn him into a saviour, who exactly is left for him to save? In the film’s relentless pursuit of violence, no one is spared, whether women, men or children.
In hindsight, I should have seen it coming from the opening act itself, where the villain severely assaults a pregnant woman.
It is already tiresome when films use violence simply to fuel the hero’s anger.
For Nagabandham, that is merely the beginning. From there on, the film completely loses its sense of adventure, moving characters effortlessly into supposedly hidden locations just so it can stage the next massacre.
There is a flashback that reveals that a couple of dodgy characters were merely red herrings and not villains after all. It barely makes sense, but amid the numbing violence, very little does.
A Tiresome Extended Backstory
Nagabandham commits its biggest cardinal sin with the backstory revealed in the second half for the hero, or rather, his previous avatar.Rudra is revealed to be the reincarnation of a Naga sadhu from the 18th century who fought against Ahmed Shah Abdali.
This backstory feels like an entirely separate film, as though Baahubali 2 has suddenly been inserted into Baahubali 1 before the movie remembers it still has its main plot to finish, rushing back to it through yet another barrage of violence and CGI snake orgy.
Okay, perhaps I am committing the sin of comparing this travesty with Rajamouli’s epics, which, for all their flaws, had compelling storytelling, genuine visual ambition and never resorted to pandering to hateful majoritarian sentiments.
The entire 18th-century stretch in Nagabandham, on the other hand, exists almost entirely to provoke ethno-religious nationalism, depicted through extended scenes of Abdali and his army brutally murdering Hindu priests, women and children while looting a temple.
Abdali, who is fashioned in the same manner as Khilji in Padmaavat, is told by Bairagi that it is not his religion that rules the world, but theirs.
Sanatana Dharma and Hindutva are invoked repeatedly to proclaim that they exist to protect the Vedic land from darkness. Near the end, the hero delivers an impassioned speech declaring that Hindus are compassionate and inclusive by nature, but if pushed too far, they will embrace violence and wear the skulls of their enemies for eternity.
Amid all the relentless bloodshed and massacring, Nagabandham even loses the visual appeal it once had. The imagery turns drab and uninspired, while the loud background score does its best to amplify that dreariness.
It is also impossible to ignore just how derivative Nagabandham is. While treading the same trodden path as earlier Telugu mytho-fantasy action films like Hanu Man, Mirai and the Akhanda films have walked on, you can also see heavy influences of Hollywood titles like 2012, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, Anaconda, Indiana Jones movies among others.
In the end, for a film obsessed with searching for hidden treasures, Nagabandham somehow loses sight of the one thing it needed most: A genuinely compelling story.
Worse, in its eagerness to invoke Hindu sentiment, the movie stumbles into a theological paradox of its own: Why does an all-powerful Supreme Being stay silent while innocents are slaughtered, only to intervene over a hidden relic?
I don’t need to wait for the promised prequel to know the answer to that one.
