Ugramm - 2014

The movie is the directorial debut of Prashant Neel and is the movie that changed the trajectory of the Kannada film industry. The movie is an action packed thriller that dives deep into the underworld in rural Karnataka. The movie was released in 2014, along with changing how India saw the Kannada film industry. The movie also bought back Sri Murali as a household name. 

The movie had an intense and raw storytelling and performances. The movie was later remade with a few script enhancements and more budgets into Saalar - The ceasefire. The storyline of both the movies are almost the same but a few characters were removed, some were added and the amount of SFX and VFX had increased substantially.

Talking about Ugramm, there are few positives and negatives to the movie. Discussing the positives, they are - 

1. The movie has an amazing narrative structure and it absolutely grips its viewers with its intensity. The character Agastya, played by Sri Murali, is a guy who is hiding from his past. At instances, we could see that old Agastya residing in the new Agastya's eyes, especially during action scenes.

2. The film has an incredible bunch of action scenes and the choreography of those was meticulously done. Even though some of them are not that realistic, given for the time when the movie was released, they did a pretty good job.

3. The cinematography was done by Ravi Varman, who has worked in highly acclaimed movies like Barfi, Ponniyen Selven 1, Mission Mangal and various other Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu movies, has shown his flair and gift while shooting the movie. Along with Ravi Varman was Bhuvan Gowda and Ravi Kumar Sana, where Bhuvan continued to work with Prashant Neel for his KGF franchise.

4. The visual style had used much more dark tones to capture the mood and atmosphere of the narrative more effectively. 

5. The music was by Ravi Basrur, who had debuted with this movie. His music was made in such a way that it complements the intense mood and facilitates it also at the same time, giving the audiences a slight goosebumps and excitement while watching.

Now that we have covered the good parts of the movie, let us move to where the movie could have improved, not only in script but in many other areas too.

1. The supporting characters lacked depth. Even though the movie is about the Agastya, it is absolutely necessary for the side characters to not be so shallow.

2. The movie does not pass the sexy lamp theory. According to the theory, a female character is not necessary or important to the storyline if she can be replaced with a sexy lamp. Agastya's mother plays a crucial role, but Nithya can totally be replaced by a sexy lamp (according to me).

3. The second half felt a little bit of pacing issues and it didn't much keep up with the first half's momentum and thus created a sense of lag.

4. The movie has some serious problems with stereotypical portrayals of people. The roles of women in the movie as a caregiver and nurturer as well as always being depended on the male lead for everything. The unnecessary need of two cousins who's main role is to say jokes or make fun of the character Nithya or to torture her. The comedic timings were terribly misplaced and i would not recommend Prashant Neel to pursue comedy and i have come to this conclusion after watching all 4 of his films. And because of this and the forced comedy, the authenticity is lost and so did realism.

5. The movie sometimes did not have that much of emotional depth considering the fact that the fallout or the reconsiliations are all something very emotional. The character of Nithya did not show that much of an emotional vulnerability considering the fact that she was kidnapped by some people who wanted to kill her and then she was rescued by some random man and then she just instantly trusts him, and normally that doesn't happen. And before Nithya and Agastya fell in love, they could have developed a little more story as how they fell in love excluding the part that he always rescues her and she is fully depended on him.

6. We could literally see from a mile away that Agastya and Nithya would end up together. We could guess that the two kids from the beginning had a fallout and that he propbably would be hiding from him. The movie follows the stereotypical genre conventions and because of that there was minimal narrative innovation.

7. I totally forgot about the Bechdel-Wallace test. The test basically says that if a movie has 2 or more female characters, and they share a screen time of more than one minute and they talk about something other than the male lead, then the movie passes it. There were mainly 3 female characters in the movie. Nithya, Agastya's mother and the neighbour. The neighbour and Nithya only have a conversation max to max for 2 minutes while Nithya and Agastya's mom (mind you only one female character has a name, even though Agastya's mom plays an important role, she doesn't have a name) have conversation regarding buying vegetables, or what to cook and things that is mainly based on the household chores and all the scenes combined together might be around 5 minutes or less. Maybe while rewriting Ugramm into Salaar, Prashant Neel might have noticed the lack of female characters that can't be replaced by a sexy lamp, so he replaced the villains with females, gave the character played by Shruti Hassan a much more decent position in Deva's house, made the female characters much more powerful and the villains (who are female) don't even talk about Deva until the interval making the remake pass the Bechdel-Wallace test but mind you Deva's mom still doesn't have a name.

Ugramm is surely a very noteworthy debut for a director and how it changed the image and lives of the actors, DOP, Editor and director is remarkable. It gave rise for directors to add intense action sequences and stellar cinematography in the Kannada Film Industry. What is more important to keep in mind is that everything has its pros and cons like every other movie and the movie had projected what great career growth Prashant Neel has.