Mirai Movie Review:

The dream of Mirai is bigger than its reality. Karthik Gattamneni’s film wants to be a mythological epic, a global action-adventure, and a Telugu star vehicle all at once. It is based on Talbot Mundy’s tantalising idea from The Nine Unknown, Ashoka entrusting secret knowledge to nine warriors, to be preserved for centuries. From here, the film spins a tale of prophecies, an evil destroyer, a sacred weapon, and a destined child. On paper, this is the stuff of midnight legends, the kind we were fed as children and believed without irony. On screen, it’s an erratic swing between moments of genuine wonder and long stretches of dead weight.

Director: Karthik Gattamneni

Cast: Teja Sajja, Ritika Nayak, Shriya Saran, Manchu Manoj, Jagapathi Babu

Let’s start with the obvious, the visual world of Mirai. Mythological adventure rests heavily on the plausibility of its universe, and here the film falters. The vision is visible, there’s effort, ambition, a genuine desire to compete with the visual spectacle of global fantasy cinema but the output feels oddly pixelated. It’s like watching 4K footage in 720P especially in the contours and the detailing. The wide shots, those drone establishing frames, carry the uncanny valley of AI-generated art.

Although makers denied using AI, but for eyes that are used to AI footage can easily spot the lack of details and odd upscaling in many shots. Sometimes the sets pass and other times, they look like carefully painted thermocol blocks. You see the strain of artisanship but not the immersion of imagination. The result is a nagging sense that you’re watching a faint shadow of an epic, not the epic itself.

Yet, for all its creaky spectacle, Mirai occasionally stirs the child in us. A pregnant saintess (Shriya Saran) foresees a cosmic war and entrusts her unborn son with the destiny to fight it. Twenty-four years later, her son is Vedha (Teja Sajja), a street thief who stumbles reluctantly toward greatness. His journey leads him to the sacred staff Mirai, linked to Lord Rama himself. There are hurdles, duels with fantastical guardians, a sacred weapon awakening and through it all, a sense that the film wants to present familiar mythology in the vein of a Japanese anime. I use this comparison here carefully. Because in its best moments, Mirai truly offers a whiff of that wide-eyed, boyhood adventure spirit.

But just as the story seems to take flight, the film cuts itself down with meandering diversions. Comedy fillers, with Getup Srinu and others, blunt that epic feeling. The pacing stretches into drags. The narrative never gathers enough steam to sustain the wonder it occasionally sparks. Mirai needed to move with a childlike energetic spirit, but it plods like an adult explaining a bedtime story after a long day at work. And that is precisely, how the film falls flat. 

The most tantalising character is not Vedha but his nemesis. All credit to Karthik Gattamneni, Manchu Manoj’s Mahabir Lama, aka Black Sword, arrives with a backstory that many such visual spectacle films don’t dare to write. Born an outcast, shunned by caste prejudice, denied dignity even when he labours for his village, Mahabir embodies the rage of a boy who sought equality but found only rejection. When he turns murderous, the morality is complicated. Is this evil, or the vengeance of a humiliated human craving for decency and respect? His arc, with its shades of Japanese anime antiheroes, could have deepened the film into a battle of philosophies, Vedha’s devotional destiny versus Mahabir’s nihilistic defiance. Well, this is where the fun ends, sadly!

The film squanders him and throws all this beautiful complexity out of the window. After that compelling origin, Mahabir is reduced to a one-note villain. The questions of justice, of divine credit versus human effort, of discriminatory practices versus true godliness, vanish. The climactic battle unfolds not as a clash of worldviews but as a long drawn fight on a train, powered more by spectacle than substance. The duel engages but doesn’t entertain or enlighten. It feels odd, being honest. Such a potentially solid story with so much passion, all goes dull and the film ends on a similar note that Teja Sajja’s HanuMan ended with.

Still, there’s Teja Sajja. His face carries the simplicity of a boy thrust into responsibility, and his earnestness makes Vedha’s arc believable. He is convincing both as the underdog thief and the reluctant savior, and his effort in fight choreography is noticeable. Compared to HanuMan, he seems more physically invested, moving with an agility that fits the film’s Eastern-inspired combat style.

The film also finds an anchor in Gowra Hari’s music. The score lends weight where the images sag, swelling at the right moments, never letting songs break the flow. It’s a small mercy that the viral number ‘Vibe Undi’ stays out of the narrative, because this film, for all its unevenness, doesn’t deserve to be punctured by misplaced dance numbers.

What Mirai ultimately offers is a film caught between ambition and execution. You can sense the filmmakers’ passion, this is definitely not lazy cinema, but passion alone doesn’t make mythology breathe. The film delivers a few thrills, yes, especially as it nears the climax, but it leaves too much unrealised. A story like this might have thrived better in a long-form series, where the world and characters could expand instead of being squeezed into a single, sometimes suffocating, runtime.