The least you'd expect from a TV show with a budget of Rs 100 crores is that it would look good. But the actors in Mahabharat are still wearing the same satin dhoti with tinsel borders and mukut made of cheap, spray-painted metal and rhinestones.
With TV becoming increasingly lucrative, it's not unusual for a serial to have some buzz before it is telecast. In case of Swastik Production's Mahabharat, it's been more of a war cry than buzz. Hoardings, advertisements, articles, YouTube promos - the heralds of this new adaptation of the Hindu epic have been many and they have all sought to proclaim how totally and absolutely awesome this teleserial will be. It's going to change how people watch TV, it will make the 9 pm news obsolete, it will revive the economy and it might even stop global warming for all anyone could tell from the promotional campaign.
Mahabharat has been in the making for three years. It's the most lavish and elaborate television production to date, claim the producers. The cast includes well known stars of the small screen galaxy and the behind-the-scenes team is formidable. Sanjay Leela Bhansali's set designer, costumes supervised by Bhanu Athaiya, a cinematographer who works mostly with films, creative inputs from author Devdutt Pattanaik - all these people blew their own and Mahabharat's trumpet in the build-up to the show's grand premiere.
Yesterday, we saw the first episode of the new Mahabharat and during the course of its one-hour slot, we were given the following:
Awful CGI
Ghastly acting
Unwieldy dialogues
Inconsistent cinematography
id*otic interpretations and modifications of the original text.
The least you'd expect from a TV show with a budget of Rs 100 crores is that it would look good. But the actors in Mahabharat are still wearing the same satin dhoti with tinsel borders and mukut made of cheap, spray-painted metal and rhinestones. The only difference between the look of this new Mahabharat and BR Chopra's Mahabharat from the 1980s is that this time round, the men are more buff, the women bare more well-toned midriffs and the budget for jewellery is better. But bling can't save the day, particularly when it's adorning actors whose idea of expressing emotion is to hold....
http://m.firstpost.com/bollywood/the-new-mahabharat-isepic-fail-1114011.html?utm_source=hp
