Kalki 2898 AD review – maximalist sci-fi epic mixes Mahabharata with Mad Max

This fizzy Telugu-language mashup of Indian mythology, martial arts and Bollywood-style dance-romance-and-melodrama plot mechanics, all filtered through a fine sci-fi sieve, is mostly a hoot. Sure, it’s a bit frustrating to sit through almost three hours, with an interval in the middle, only to find that we’re probably less than halfway through the overall saga at the end. But everyone will just have to wait until further instalments from what the film calls the Kalki Cinematic Universe to drop to find out what happens to the teeming cast of characters. Such is the price of living in an age when films are episodic like television or comic books, and everything is part of a franchise, a universe or even multiverse. On some level it’s all so exhausting.

Indeed, the last 15 minutes of Kalki 2898 AD, with a huge pile up of reveals, reversals, shocks and cliff hangers is positively enervating but in a fun way that feels earned by all the groundwork laid out in the previous two and three-quarters hours. It all starts in the battlefield 3,000-odd years ago, where warrior Ashwatthama (played by superstar Amitabh Bachchan), a character in the epic Sanskrit poem the Mahabharata, is cursed by Krishna for trying to kill an unborn child. His punishment is to live for ever until he rights this wrong by saving a future reincarnation of God.

Before there’s any time to digest this we jump to the year 2898, where Earth is a withered dystopia. The first and last city is Kasi, which consists of a slum on the ground and a ginormous inverted pyramid called the Complex – the ultimate high-rise – floating in the air; all of it ruled over by a cruel semi-divine dictator named Supreme Yaskin (Kamal Haasan). This world-building is introduced as we meet a clutch of key characters. First and foremost is Bhairava (Prabhas, like Dwayne Johnson but with better dance moves), a wisecracking, self-interested mercenary ripe for emotional redemption. He decides to pursue a bounty in Sum-80 (Deepika Padukone), a runaway from the Complex who is part of a nefarious experiment that extracts magical fetal tissue from farmed pregnant women that Supreme Yaskin uses to moisturise his desiccated frame.

That’s only the barest bones of the story. It all feels like a blend of the aforementioned Mahabharata with The Matrix and Mad Max franchises, what with the saviour figure at the heart of the story and a desert-set mid section involving souped-up vehicles chasing each other. Meanwhile, in just the same way that the Black Panther films redefined a distinctive Afrofuturist aesthetic, the look here my be described as Indofuturist, a blend of design motifs and sparkly, colour-saturated visual effects that looks both futuristic and somehow hand-crafted at the same time. There are brassy looking, intricately patterned weapons that look like scimitars or bows but give off bright-blue CGI sparks, Tibetan sand mandalas that erupt into magical fire, the sort of saris that Barbarella might have worn. It’s all a lot, as they say, but those with a taste for maximalism will swoon over the goods on offer here.

• Kalki 2898 AD is in cinemas now.