Dasavatharam...

Firstly let me put in a disclaimer that I am not a movie critic and have no intentions of putting down someone else's hardwork. Having said that, I take the liberty of penning my opinions of the movie Dasavatharam as a regular movie watcher.

Before I could say anything else, hats off to Kamal for daring such a movie. His performance is excellent in the whole movie especially in the roles of Poovaragan, Balran naidu and to some extent in Fletcher's role. The voice modulations, accent and body language are more than impeccable. The other roles I felt were overkill mainly Kalifullah, Patti and Avatar Singh, aleast the make up part of it.

Kamal as an actor is brilliant as ever and has put in a great deal of hardwork. It is evident from the way he has metticulously portrayed each role with great attention to minute details. That is all the more the reason why I feel he should have restricted himself to that area which he does the best. Agreed he is a great script writer and director which he established in movies like Hey Ram and Anbe Sivam. However just because he is all over the movie in 10 different roles it is hard to do justice to each area and there he fails.

The movie starts with Kamal's speech about Chaos theory. To be honest I got the wind that the movie is based on the theory before I actually watched it and had built an expectation. May be that is the reason for my disappointment but then again I was prejudiced. The 18th century nambi is tied to Vishnu idol and drowned in the sea. People say this is the initial condition for chaos that resulted in Tsunami in the last scene. My question is the role of Nambi in that. I feel Nambi's presence or absence neverthless would have resulted in the idol being pushed in sea. So the significance of that role is not justified.

Chaotic systems are dynamic systems which evolve dynamically with the progression of time and are sensitive to the initial conditions. Having defined that, my question is what is the chaotic system under question in this movie. Tsunami?? In that case the movie just shows the initial condition of the Tsunami (if you can accept that an 10 feet long idol can cause plate tectonics to change to trigger an earthquake and eventually a Tsunami). After that nothing in the movie really shows the evolution of that chaos. To make it simple, none of the events happening in the current state of the movie per say affects the happening of Tsunami. We cannot just say its chaos just because it is sensitive to the initial conditions as many dynamic system (tending to infinity) can be built based on mathematical model which can be deterministic and need not end in a chaos.

The events that go on with present day Kamal seem to be more a stochastic system rather chaos. Even if it can classified as chaos what is the relation between the Tsunami and this. Just that the time of both these chaotic systems converges which more simply can be referred as coincidence. There are such loose ends which is little haunting considering the intellectual movie maker Kamal is.

Again I'd like to reiterate that it is one of the good movies released in the year (not just because others were bad) and a very brave effort. But the screenplay is too soggy and is surfeit with complications. Though Kamal's 10 different roles were innovative and a treat to watch one fails to understand the rationale behind doing so with such a storyboard.