Mani Ratnam is one of the top-rated directors in India. Even when many industries were stuck at mass traditional concept films, he made films that are very futuristic no matter when you watch them. Geethanjali, for instance, feels like a gorgeous love spectacle even today. The way Mani conceives a story and brings it to the screen is his forte. But for the last few years, he is moving off his unique selling point, says the cine observers.
Every director will have his own strengths and limitations and one should play to his strengths if he or she needs to survive in the film industry. While Mani is strong on love and romantic genre in which he brings out even the smallest nuances onto the screen, he opted for a huge-scale war, action movie like Ponnian Selvan.
Although it not impossible to score a hit going out of one’s comfort zone, Mani made a few mistakes in the case of PS1. After the release of Baahubali, no matter who makes a historical or mythological or war movie, it is compared with Baahubali. That is the mark and impact BB has created in the Indian film industry. Bollywood was desperate to break BB and made a few huge-budgeted movies only to fail. In Tamil and Malayalam too, many attempted and tasted the same result. According to Kollywood sources, PS was made to prove the mettle of Tamil cinema and break BB’s impact.
Although it is not wrong to be ambitious, Mani has opted for a complicated story like Ponnian Selvan novel which is very difficult to transform into a film with the same impact. Moreover, his main mistake is to present the novel as it is. While there is plenty of scope to introduce the main characters with hair-raising action sequences, Mani chose to go with very plain and simple entries, similar to the novel.
The roles, Vikram as Aditya Karikala Chola and Jayam Ravi as the titular Ponnian Selvan were almost wasted. Only Karthi’s Vandiyadevan was proved to be the face-saver of the flick albeit in the novel too, that role acts as the key cog. Cine experts say that Mani should have taken the inspiration from the novel and applied his brilliance rather than blindly following the novel.