Director: Chandoo Mondeti
Written By: Chandoo Mondeti
Cinematography: Karthik Gattamneni
Cast: Nikhil Siddharth, Anupama Parameswaran, Srinivasa Reddy, Anupam Kher, etc.
Release Language: Telegu
Plot:
The protagonist of the movie is Karthikeya who, if you have watched the earlier movie, is a doctor but has a curious mind with quite a bit of daring using which he solves mysteries and cases. The movie takes us to Dwarka, the city of Lord Krishna where Karthikeya is entrusted with the arduous task of finding the anklet of Lord Krishna which was entrusted to Uddhava by the Lord himself right before the beginning of Kaliyuga. The anklet has been hidden in some corner of India and can only be found who is deserving and chosen by the lord by having wits, courage, will to sacrifice and ability to think about the greater good.
The bad guys are a secret society which has gone rogue in order to pursue material gain instead of serving the public. The secret society wants to gain the anklet for themselves so that they can interpret ancient knowledge in order to find solutions to the modern problems and cash in on it. Here both sides are devoted to the lord but for completely different reasons.
How Karthikeya achieves this task by finding keys, solving clues and uncovering secrets which bring him closer and closer to understanding the Lord.
Analysis:
The movie is certainly different from the usual riff-raff we are used to seeing in Bollywood but that is a given since it has always been the Tollywood industry that has remained true and proud of our cultural roots in the movies that are made there. Unlike the infamous Bollywood industry which has thrived on denigrating, belittling and spreading misinformation about our culture and greatness of Hinduism in the past, this movie takes a completely different approach. It not only promotes the audience to question everything (which is a core essence of teachings in Hinduism) but also emphasizes the grandness of our ancient history.
The movie does that by focusing on the history of Lord Krishna and what transpired long ago in the story of his demise, the start of Kaliyuga and his anklet. The tone of the movie is kept light with the main focus being on solving the mystery and nowhere during the runtime does the audience feel the movie becoming unnecessarily preachy or digressing from its path.
The movie was made on a budget of 15-30 crores INR and grossed more than 120 crores INR on the box office. While movies like Lal Singh Chadda (copy of the Oscar winning Forrest Gump) and Anurag Kashyap’s DoBaaraa (copy of the 2018 Spanish movie Mirage), the abominations they were, were getting removed from the theatres within a week, Karthikeya 2 started from 75 theatres and reached 2500 theatres within the week!
Conclusion:
Finally, a movie which thumps its chest and proudly declares it is based on Hinduism, a movie which does not shy away to show the glory of the amazing past, the trove of knowledge and core philosophies in Hinduism. The story shows the glorious history and the center of great culture and civilization India was in our ancient past spreading from Indian ocean to the Atlantic. The ending of the movie couldn’t have been better – there is an old theory which says that the sunken city of Dwarka is actually the lost city of Atlantis. This has been hinted towards the end of the movie calling for a sequel. Hope they follow up on it. There is great material of books that are available in the market which can help forming the story ahead.
It was fun to watch the movie as the plot is slowly revealed while the characters are on the adventure. Nowhere in the movie does the plot appear to be boring and the 2 hours 30 mins of runtime passes away in an instance, all the while keeping the audience engrossed in the plot. If you have seen the previous Karthikeya movie then this is certainly going to be a treat. This movie is a must watch. I will rate it 4.5.
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