"To fight injustice is justice itself."
Hello everyone!
And I know it's probably unbearable. I'm sorry!
But here we are, and here we'll stay for the foreseeable future.
... or at least, until I run out of good movies to watch, I suppose.
Right now, for tonight, we're taking a look at a movie which features a young man, a farmer, dreaming and yearning for something beyond his narrow horizon, but his uncle won't let him spread his wings to fly further than what he knows.
If you think this is Star Wars, you'd be wrong, although the premise is wildly similar - almost identical.
In fact, this is a 2016 BC kind of story, with no Death Star or Darth Vader in sight. This is Mohenjo Daro.
Mohenjo Daro isn't a very old movie at this point - having been made in 2016 - and it somehow manages to combine story beats from Star Wars, Kingdom of Heaven, Aladdin and The Lion King all in one. How? Read on!
Sarman (Roshan, the only reason I even picked this up LOL), the afore-mentioned farmer's boi who wants to finally go and TRADE INDIGO RATHER THAN HARVEST IT, DAMN IT! really wants to go to Mohenjo Daro. His uncle really doesn't want him to go, but eventually, when he realizes the kid's going to run off anyway, he gives him a unicorn seal and says to only use it in a life-or-death situation, then sends him and his own son, Hojo, to the city.
Once there, Sarman's quick to realize that, welp, it's really not all that cute, because greed is much more important than fair trade, and the Senate Chief Maham rules with an iron fist (aka, anyone who opposes him ends up dead on a spike).
Our hero wants to pack up immediately. The air's too impure with injustice!
Me: don't worry, he'll see the girl now and want to stay
Movie: here, have our heroine, the Chosen One, Chaani!
Listen, this writes itself, I'm not writing it at all LOL.
Sarman sees the daughter of the Priest, on whom all the lives in Mohenjo Daro hinge because she's supposedly blessed by their Mother Goddess and brings prosperity to the city. He falls head-over-heels and - because first love is like that - uses the unicorn seal to enter the Upper City so he can see her.
Which he does - and saves her from some rampaging horses, while he's at it, so of course she goes all goo-goo eyes at this guy, when even her own dad was like EVERY BISH FOR HERSELF as soon as the horses stampeded.
Note: considering I'm also watching House of the Dragon at the moment, I was wondering when Roshan was going to start talking High Valyrian to the beasts LOL
Anyway, Sarman's definitely got it bad, bad enough that he even sings and dances in participation of some festival he possibly has no clue about, but learns anyway on the fly (as a hero does), and he shouldn't have to worry because Chaani's now all moony-eyed over the dude, too.
HER plan is to sneak into the Lower City without her imposing headdress and other regalia, which means no one recognizes her, so she and Sarman can have their A Whole New World moment ... until one of Maham's cronies spots them and they have to run off and hide (was I singing One Jump Ahead while they did so? Maybe ...).
This then kickstarts something else: Maham had betrothed the girl to his son when she was just born, because for some odd reason, these people in Mohenjo Daro ostracize kids whose mothers die in childbirth, but when Chaani was declared the Chosen One instead, Maham decided to hop this train and ride it to glory.
So, you know, her flirting with anyone BUT his son is a big mistake-a to make-a, and he puts pressure on the priest to speed up the whole wedding process, which her dad can at least delay a little since she can't be married before the Moon Bath ritual (read: just a ritual during which she submerges a statue of their goddess on the night of the full moon, and lovers who confess their feelings are proclaimed as basically married).
Sarman steals into this ritual taking the place of the unicorn in the menagerie of "animals" dancing around Chaani, and then goes on to both steal her promise of companionship AS WELL AS her first kiss (she says she was mad and not wanting him to kiss her, but I beg to differ, miss; considering every single shot of this movie has Roshan's eyes looking like clear-cut jewels, you wanted to kiss him, badly).
Only, it's not to be, and she tries to make him understand, but of course young love and all that. It eventually leads to him and Maham's son fighting, then Maham putting a stop to this and saying Sarman can win his freedom if he fights these two crazy cannibalistic killers ... which, our hero agrees to, on the condition that if he wins, Chaani is set free from her betrothal.
Psyche, thinks Maham, this country bumpkin is an idiot. And agrees.
The priest, knowing Chaani's basically doomed if she goes on with the marriage, visits Sarman in jail and tells him that the reason he feels like Mohenjo Daro is a place he's been to before, and potentially the reason why he keeps seeing the unicorn in his dreams (said unicorn being, for all intents and purposes, a goat with just one horn, snow-white), is because his father was the Senate Chief before Maham, the greatest Mohenjo Daro had ever known.
Alas, Maham, expelled from his home town after dealing with the Sumerians on the side, brings his nefarious games to Mohenjo Daro as well, building a dam on the river to mine for gold, and then making it look like Sarman's dad is the one with the gold problem.
Hence, one of the skeletons on those poles with the bodies? Daddy-o. But because he was betrayed by everyone, including the priest AND HIS BROTHER, you know, the guy who raised Sarman, they spirited the kid out of the city and into the farmlands.
Now though, the priest urges him to take control of his destiny and return, the lost prodigal son, to lead Mohenjo Daro out of darkness. So Sarman goes on to win this stupid fight, annoyed to no end with what's happening, while Maham's over there furious and fuming. All his neat plans of leaving the Senate Chief seat to his son are unfolding! But hey, they have the bronze weapons the Sumerians brought them, so maybe his boy can go get rid of the obstacles standing in the way.
Unknown to the men, Maham's wife overhears this, and thankfully, too, because she alerts Sarman, who comes running to Chaani's aid after the idiot attacks them at the temple, killing her father. He meets his own demise when Sarman ends up killing HIM, instead, and then Chaani reveals the truth about Sarman to the people in the Lower City, as well as the fact that Maham's lying to them about wanting Mohenjo Daro to prosper with the gold he's mining.
They intercept the Sumerians and the gold, and then confront Maham during a Senate meeting, at which point our villain already knows just who this upstart kid going up against him is (it should be noted that Sarman incites rebellion at an earlier point in the movie, saying people won't be paying more tax to the Senate Chief just because he says so). He's sentenced to death, but before anyone can do anything about it, a look-out Sarman had posted on the dammed river (having bad feelings, what with a storm brewing and all) comes running to say the dam's about to burst.
The storm made it absolutely worse, and the river's about to rush right over Mohenjo Daro.
Thinking quickly and using his impressive set of skills (good CGI unfortunately not included here), Sarman and his allies construct a boat bridge to get the people to safety at a very high vantage point, which they reach just in time.
The river rises right up to their feet, taking Mohenjo Daro - and Maham - under, and Sarman leads his people in search of a new home. They end up finding it on the bank of another river; this one, he names Ganga, after seeing the unicorn standing there, as if it had been waiting for him to arrive.
And seeing as we all know just what river it is, we can safely say Mohenjo Daro is an origin story.
Three hours long and thankfully vastly entertaining, it's definitely one of those movies you can't take too seriously; while it has fantastic costume design and the sets feel lived-in and real, the CGI leaves a hell of a lot to be desired, the acting is WAY over-the-top at plenty of points (for some reason, all smiles seem like the Stepford Wives' ones), and I'm sure people would be able to list inconsistencies until they were blue in the face.
Ultimately, however, the fact is this: it's just not a good movie in the sense of, you can understand why it flopped. Hrithik Roshan alone couldn't save this thing, no matter how much they worked overtime for the eyes effect and how he fought for justice to be served. It's an entertaining spectacle, to be sure, one that includes Jaws-like models of crocodiles chomping at their victims, but overall leaves a lot to be desired.
Not exactly among my top favourites, even if it is unique, and even if I'm glad I watched it!
xx
*images and video not mine
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