Yesterday, David wrote about the stunning climax of the Tamil movie Endhiran, the most expensive movie in Indian cinema history. I just got around to watching it and I was so completely boggled by its brilliance that I thought it was worth revisiting.
Imagine that you took the Axe Cop kid and teamed him up with the Wachowskis, along with every serious SFX wizard on the subcontinent, and said, "Go ahead kid, spend whatever it takes to make the most demented, blood-drenched, bullet-addled, ultra-super-duper-violent action sequence in the history of films." Then you waited a generation for another Axe Cop kid to be born and raised on the first kid's output, to grow to maturity, and you gave her the same challenge: that's about one tenth of one percent as demented, glorious and violent as this ten-minute climactic scene manages.
Killer robots, a seeming infinitude of them, outnumbered only by the endless cannon-fodder Indian soldiers, each with his own machinegun. There are many like it, but this one is his. And it will soon be the killer robots. They will form into enormous, improbable geometrical solids, and they will improvise with those guns to create enormous whirling ballistic buzz-saws of death, except when they're forming up into huge, stylized cobras and such. And there are lorries filled with gas bottles, daring kamikaze missile-firing choppers (each more doomed than the last), and, of course, a software worm with the power to overcome them. Or does it?
There are only two copies of this movie for sale on Amazon (as of this writing), though I expect that will self-correct shortly, as this clip (with its curiously fitting Russian-language descriptive track) is ripping through the Anglo Internet, where thousands of potential watchers wait only for the opportunity to snap up their own copy of this genuinely unprecedented monsterpiece.
YouTube – Best action scene ever. ever. ever. — Endhiran (Robot)
