This movie is one, really fun, action-packed, superhero watch. The CGI, of course, is fantastic. What I love about this movie, though, is that it's not just an empty, trivial story as an excuse for CGI. Quite the contrary. The story itself is a fictionalized version of a very real, revolutionary period just before Gandhi's non-violence movement took the lead.

If anyone could make any complaint at all, it would be that the British roles are caricatures. Honestly though, what do we white Americans know of how Imperial Britain treated its "non-white subjects"? We DO know that, in 1919, British troops fired on a crowd of unarmed protesters killing hundreds of men, women and children. So the film is steeped in real history. Perhaps, the caricatures were Rajamouli's way of side-stepping the issue by allowing the viewer to accept them at the same level of unreality as the two super heroes of the film.

The film itself is over the top, fun and action-packed. It even has the requisite Bollywood dance scenes! I loved the way Ram became Rama, the mythological Hindu archer, an avatar of Vishnu. I probably missed other cultural references, but I suspect that when the two superheroes cooperate, they have 4 arms - that is Shiva, the destroyer with a bow and arrow in two of the arms. The story and production design are gripping. S.S. Rajamouli does such an amazing job with the pacing that three hours seems to fly by before you can even say popcorn.