Captain Movie Review: This creature feature is an all-round disappointment

You know what they’ll tell you when you express dislike for a film like Captain that follows in director Shakti Soundar Rajan’s long list of attempts to regionalise Hollywood genre films (space, zombie, teddy, and now, creature feature). Oh, come on, we don’t have the budget; at least, this is an attempt! What such responders don’t understand is that it’s not the bad CG that kills a film like Captain. Of course, with world cinema accessible at the click of a button, we don’t tolerate substandard CG anymore—and no, budgetary constraints ought not to be a topic really because theatres don’t exactly charge lesser for such films and neither do they offer snacks at subsidised prices because we have bought tickets for local, low-budget cinema. So, while the minotaur creature in this film doesn’t ever feel real—never walking, jumping, fighting, or reacting in a way that convinces you of its life—that’s not quite the problem with Captain. The problem is a more familiar demon: silly, superficial writing.

Director: Shakti Soundar Rajan

Cast: Arya, Simran, Harish Uttaman

And the performances don’t help either. Arya plays army man Vetriselvan, who’s introduced through a series of coordinated killing. Who are they killing? Is the killing justified? We are not supposed to ask such questions. It’s Vetriselvan and team killing for the country; so, we are supposed to try and enjoy the rush of patriotism coursing through our veins. For some reason, Arya seems like he’s interpreted the character as an emotionally stunted person—which ends up coming through as apathy in performance. In one scene, Vetri figures out an idea by overhearing a stray conversation—as we have seen happen a million times in such films—but the way the actor plays that scene, you would think it’s not a positive development. So, I wondered: What’s causing this unprocessed agony? Is it the unusual upbringing he had? Is he a bit of a loner like in his previous film with this director, Teddy? But he has a gang of friends and colleagues he swears by? The film doesn’t ever tell us much about Vetri, except that he’s an army man and he prefers that all of us be patriotic. Those who aren’t, he believes, need to “grow up”.

For lack of any real understanding about this cold professional, you take in everything from a distance. There’s a half-hearted attempt to explore his friendship with a fallen officer (Harish Uthaman) and the need to repair his destroyed reputation, but given how little we know about Vetri himself, it’s hard to summon much love for his friend who dies quite quickly into the film. While on death, this film establishes early on that Vetri and team must destroy a minotaur-like creature that’s living in an uninhabited area. I thought it strange that there’s such little opposition to killing a creature that the humans barely know about. There’s no debate about whether the said killing is needed in the first place; there’s no weighing the positives and negatives of potentially eliminating what could well be an alien lifeform. There’s a convoluted plot twist that perhaps addresses this, but it ends up coming too late and feels like a gimmick.

Much like in the Greek myth, our Theseus must solve some puzzles before he can get to the minotaur. What’s causing people to lose their minds in the presence of the creature? Who’s controlling it? Is there a purpose to this creature? The what and how of these revelations fall flat. Take the lab scene in which Dr Keerthy (Simran) realises that the creature may well be alive. It’s supposed to be an alarming moment, but I was already busy laughing at the doctor’s incompetency.

Right at the beginning, Vetriselvan speaks of the four stages of combat: identification, fight, identification of weakness, deception… In a sense, I went through those stages during this film. Having identified that this is a bad film, my fight was to hang about and hope for some emotional investment. The third stage is supposed to be about weakness identification, and frankly, this film’s weaknesses—subpar performances, bad writing, unconvincing CG—scream louder than the minotaur in it. We would all be victims of deception (Vetri’s fourth stage) if we forgave emotionally hollow, lazily written films for the ‘effort’. There’s a final stage, Vetriselvan says later, that only fighters—and film viewers too, I think—know all too well. “Sacrifice!” he says. I think it might be a tad overdramatic for me to refer to the time spent in the theatre as a sacrifice, but to be fair to the film, it’s at least mindful enough to not be indulgently long. I suppose it says a lot when you watch a film, and you are grateful that it isn’t longer than it is.