In February 1983,Satyajit Ray in an interview with India Today magazine claimed that neither E.T. nor Close Encounters of the Third Kind "would have been possible without the script of 'The Alien' being available throughout America.".Ray had perceived the idea 1967 and had a failed attempt with Columbia pictures in transforming the script into a movie .Had that movie been made and got success,imagine where India could have been right now in the sci-fi world!
In this article we are not going to talk about the most obvious causes of India not making good sci-fi movies,like the VFX being expensive and producers not willing to spend on new ideas because of their lack of faith on Indian audience or the compulsive inclusion of dance and songs which when not done to point,kills the realism. Instead we will be discussing the other factors,some debatable and try to maybe,find some solutions.
First of all,we have a severe lack of source material. Most of the Hollywood superhero or sci-fi flicks have been inspired or adapted by a pre-existing literary work, be it a comics,novel or short story.These have been a part of American pop culture for many years,the style just got transformed from print to the silver-screen.
Some of the the most popular 'Indian' superheroes like Shaktimaan,Nagraj,Doga are blatant rip-offs of American superheroes.The problem while copying that the American superhero is that he is a product of the "American" problems,and is so dipped in American values that merely changing the setting to India is not going to work.An Indian superhero has to have Indian problems,Indian values.The closest thing we have come to doing this is perhaps Mr. India and more recently with Vikramaditya Motwane's Bhavesh Joshi,whose drastic failure at the box-office was a huge dent in the future of other similar productions.
Yes,we have a gigantic collection of stories in our mythologies.A character will only work when it seems relatable to people,and for that you have to show his flaws, his human characters.And in a country like India you can't simply show a mythological character in a grey shade without offending anyone.You simply can't show them anything but as a honourable and righteous supreme man.Could Tony Stark ever be the lovable persona he is without showing his deepest angst,his flaws and his overall growth from a careless genius to a tender paragon?
The solution to it might lie if we start creating content about the tangential or lesser known characters,the characters people have not so strong a feeling,thus lesser the chance of people's sentiment getting hurt. But it would be ideal to make it on a small scale to minimise the damage,if caused by the lesser popularity of the character.
We have certainly failed to create the "Universe" concept like MCU,Harry Potter,Star Wars Universe what Western media does brilliantly.
We inherently tend to give a chance to instalments of a universe we are invested in,no matter good or bad content,like people will still rush to the theaters for the 3rd Fantastic Beasts(part of Harry Potter Universe) movie despite first two's moderate to negative response.And our Kkrish and Robot's further instalments are sure to fail if the storytelling standards keep on decreasing despite spending millions on CGI.
Everything needs its fair share of time.For Batman to be this darker and edgier,it had to come a long way through the 60's Adam West's rather comical and dancing Batman.An "Interstellar" wouldn't have been possible without Kubrick with his ground-breaking technologies and imagination with "2001:A Space Odyssey".We need to have a generation of writers and film-makers working on original new pieces and the directors to have faith on them for a transition in viewing experience of the Indian audience who have been fed the "formula" masala family dramas for years.And movies like "Bhavesh Joshi",Vasan Bala's "Mard ko Dard Nahin Hota" and Arati Kadav's "Cargo" have done a tremendous job as the stepping stone.Sci-fi stories from authors like Sukanya Datta,Sumit Basu as well as TVF's creator Arunabh Kumar's new graphic novels "Indusverse" can be well adapted to digital platforms.
And next time when we see a Hollywood sci-fi breaking our imagination barriers,rather than thinking "Yeh toh sirf English picture wale hi soch sakte hai",grab a pen and let your wildest imaginations flow for we belong to India,the land to which the world owes its first ever successful imagination of the extra terrestrials.
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