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“Ramayana: Rise of a Legend” retells the thousand-year-old Hindu epic on a spectacular scale. Part of a planned duology, this Hindi studio film was released by Sony Pictures outside India. Sony Pictures hopes it will be a cross-cultural hit, wooing audiences who don’t usually watch the latest Bollywood films every weekend. Among the strategies for this release was a lavish Comic-Con panel and an English dub of the film, the version that was released to the press prior to the review ban. But language is not the only difference. This version is nearly 30 minutes shorter than the Hindi original and removes some make-or-break material.
The Hindi version was eventually shown to the press (a day before the film’s release), but early reviews were quick to point out the awkward method of transposition. Dubbing into other languages is nothing new, but AI-assisted lip syncing to the actors’ mouth movements gives English performances an unnatural quality. Of course, the internal program developed for this purpose (named “Brahma AI” after the Hindu creator god who appears in one of the film’s many prologues) appears to be a bit more ethical than most generative AIs. The process involves not only recording English lines by real humans (and in some cases, the original actors themselves), but also capturing real mouth performance (the creepy sounds) to map onto the original faces. In essence, the data set appears to be entirely internal, so the theft aspect of the wider AI problem is not an issue here. However, the exaggerated lip movements distract from the effect, and the English dialogue itself is clunky and emotionally restricted.
For comparison’s sake, this becomes abundantly clear when you watch the barely-there Hindi version on opening day at the labyrinthine 25-screen AMC in Times Square, New York’s Indian film mecca. The original cut doesn’t magically make a movie great. It still has the same haphazard approach to creating the action and the same bizarre CGI, but it calls into question how Sony attempted to localize (and globalize) the film for larger viewership. Most obviously, the performance is more emotionally compelling in its original form, and the reverberations of the original dialogue are much more suited to a large-scale epic, while the mixing of the English dialogue conjures up images of a claustrophobic studio booth. But a more puzzling comparison is between the various cuts and how each affects the story.
The English version is 166 minutes, about 30 minutes shorter than the original. With that much delay, you’d expect inconsistencies to become apparent early on, but surprisingly, the two films are virtually identical for the first two hours or so. They cover much the same ground between the stories of the origins of the demon king Ravana (Yash), the condensed growth of the heroic prince Rama (Ranbir Kapoor) and his eventual exile to the forest with his elegant wife Sita (Sai Pallavi) and his devoted brother Lakshmana (Ravi Dubey). The differences mainly lie in the way the scenes are played, especially the montages backed by songs.
There are few traditional dance numbers in the film, but in sequences where the wider details of the poem are squeezed into running time, the English version initially removes only minor subplots and cuts them here and there. For example, when Rama and Sita first meet and talk, the prince mentions that he wants to marry Sita only if his siblings can marry on the same day, while Rama’s three brothers are also seen flirting with various women around the palace. This is not in the English version, as are the three additional wedding scenes during Rama and Sita’s wedding. It may not be the most important thing to include from a plot perspective, but it certainly hints at the overall nature of the story, with Rama trying to keep his promise as fate is twisted in his favor.
Nonetheless, this and a few other deletions are not necessarily missing from a significant portion of the running time, such as a few extra action beats from existing scenes, and additional scenes of Rama and Sita living in the kingdom of Ayodhya and getting to know its people. But they give the story some breathing room, and that’s never a bad thing. In any case, the most destructive removals are much more noticeable. It arrives at about two hours of its Hindi runtime, with one dramatic scene (or three scenes in quick succession, depending on how you count it) that forms the emotional core of the film and effectively resolves the major issues of the second half of the English version.
Both films end with the giant humanoid bird king Jatayu attempting to rescue Sita, who has been kidnapped by Ravana, from a flying chariot. The scene is visually dazzling, but it feels somewhat random, like the film’s climax (rather than the midpoint or inciting incident, the epic has been split very inelegantly). This eventually leads to a sad speech about Rama defying his fate and forging his own path as he plans to march to Ravana’s kingdom of Lanka. In the English version, this feels like a distinction without a difference, since Rama’s training by various priests and sages actually anticipated his conflict with Ravana. However, many of these dangling threads feel more emotionally intact in the Hindi version, thanks to the aforementioned scene, traditionally known as the Bharat Milap, or the encounter with Rama’s brother Bharat, who ascends the throne in his stead.
In a subplot completely absent from the British cut, the royal procession reaches Rama’s humble hut, where Bharat, who had no idea about the palace plot to replace Rama as king, informs him of his father’s death. In the English version, it is unclear when Lamar learned of this major development (which also appears in the film’s final scene), leaving the viewer to intuit that it happened off-screen. But this is not the only problem. bharat beeswax Solve it.
After Rama scatters his father’s ashes, the two brothers have an emotional conversation with Lakshmana by his side. Bharat tries to persuade Rama to return to Ayodhya and take the throne, but Rama decides to remain in the forest, believing that this path of asceticism has been laid out for him as part of his destiny and divine duty. Meanwhile, Lakshmana harbors a grudge against Bharat and is angered by Rama’s decision to remain in exile, even though he follows this as part of his duty and moral code.
First of all, this makes Lakshmana much more meaningful as a character in subsequent scenes, where he sometimes flies off the handle. Without these important exchanges that signal his state of mind, his volatility seems arbitrary (sadly, neither version really succeeds in his comedic travesty). Again, these missing scenes give Lamar an actual character arc and infuse the film with an important throughline into how various characters approach the idea of divine destiny.
When Sita is kidnapped and Rama comforts the dying Jatayu (Jatayu, by the way, also appears briefly in the missing scene, making his climactic arrival less abrupt), there is a direct causal link between these events. Not only is Rama a witness to his wife’s kidnapping and Jatayu’s murder, but he also feels guilty for deciding to remain alone and vulnerable in the first place. When he says he defies fate and writes his own story, this is no longer the cliché story of the English version. It becomes a direct call to action in his own decision-making, in which he chooses, out of a sense of sacred duty, to follow the lifelong path laid out before him.
This eventually feeds into another scene (albeit a small one) where Ravana and his brothers argue over whether or not to kidnap Sita in the first place. The concept of fate comes to mind once again in the idea that for Ravana to go down this violent path may be that the gods actually want to trap him in battle with Rama. Because the film is only the first half, the main heroes and villains never interact, and the English version doesn’t even feel thematically binding. This concept of fate presented in Rama and Bharat’s dialogue in the original cut set the protagonist and antagonist on an inevitable collision course.
Considering that one of the few things most Western viewers know about Hindi cinema is its historically prodigious length, the decision to reduce its running time makes indirect sense. But when Hollywood films like the “Avatar” sequel or “Avengers: Endgame” (and even Indian hits like the Telugu language “RRR”) attract audiences with runtimes of three hours or more, this phantom barrier is clearly not insurmountable. Cutting it down to a still-solid 2 hours and 46 minutes is unlikely to be the deciding factor for many viewers. People tend to round up or shorten from that length.
This feels akin to Harvey Weinstein-like interference, but according to Sony, this particular decision was made with input from the “Ramayana: Rise of a Legend” team. But whatever the impetus for these competing cuts now playing in theaters, the decision to cut the important emotional and thematic core of the meeting between brothers is downright confusing. It’s the heart and soul of the story, and erasing it would be completely devastating to the way the film progresses. So if you want to choose between the two versions, the choice should be very clear.