Why Indian Cinema Need a Serious and Hard-Core Science Fiction Film in its Credit.

Science and Cinema –The Twain shall always Meet

Opening impressive scene stills from movie P.K (2015)

 Open terrace in any Indian home acquires a quite special place in everybody life .Time when we used to live an un-airconditioned life it rescued us from the nights of ‘batti gul’ time in scorching summers .Sleeping upstairs in open thinking about stars and space while watching the vast night sky and making opinion about the possibility of universe and galaxies beyond, there was something deeply enigmatic in creating idea about comparing ourselves with a medieval age sailor who is standing at seaboard looking at the vast ocean and thinking about the unknown possibilities beyond the miles of water. The leaping success of India in space technology intersecting with recently released Hollywood flicks like Gravity and Interstellar dealing with hard science fiction became the hot talking point among Indians who usually are unmoved towards Hollywood big studios films.

Still scene from Film Interstellar (2014)

              


They enjoyed the film notwithstanding their age or taste. The romance between science and art which are traditionally at the opposite pole in the stream of scholastic study clearly established .Interstellar ran almost month similar like Titanic or Jurassic Park. This space epic was enjoyed for 2 specific reasons in India.

(1) The mass craze which was created due to the success of Mangalyan and Chandranyan (the 2 phenomenal maiden space mission by ISRO) .

2) The teenagers of India who born in 90’s and who are in actual unaware with Hollywood’s earlier made hard science fiction space voyage films but who usually go theatres for cheap staple of junk like Transformers or Avengers .
 

Shankar-One of the ace director from Chennai who is consciously trying to push a level of science fiction film in India

India is really craving for serious science fiction stuff entertainment which Indian film industry still not provided to them honestly. Today the success of NASA which made America a space daring nation owe much allegiance to the Holly wood which exploited the scientific inquisitiveness of Americans by creating a entertainment market viciously profiting by enhancing the imaginative craze and scientific quest of people by showing sometime as bizarre and z grade like “attack of 50 foot women” !! To spiritually creative like “2001 space odyssey” the one made by Stanly Kubrick in late 60’s.The rationality-irrationality, truth-untruth, pseudo science- hard science, possibility-impossibility was not at all the issue when these movies were made. Since 50s specially during the cold war era the one or other American cities attacked by some alien or extraterrestrial enemy or eco terror either emerging from water or coming from space resoluting to destroy their country and every time a typical Anglo Saxon hero shown romantic, brave, rational and scientifically enlightened inventing technique to kill the threat .If family drama was a typical staple for Indians for many decade similarly the mad crave for achieving fabled dominance over world was continuously reflecting into their cinematic energy which in some way consciously echoed the sense of weakness and helplessness against Russian power dominance and pain inflicted by Vietnamese on Americans .Post second world war Hollywood was practically a propaganda arm of the space race against Russian . (Russian failed not because they were lacking vision in establishing powerful glamorous cinema but the very freedom of expression which is needed to establish professional and commercialy viable artful film culture and also in some way the incompetence of communism to put a credible, intellectual and calculative debate against western capitalist model of their relevancy).There was hunger for exploring stories of strange lands , hostile territories .Space was exciting, unpredictable but fun and yet it was dangerous too but humans would rise up to the challenges offered by countless aliens and predators . 
Traditionaly the Indian cinema was always dominated by the non creative- profit making vultures of Sindhi and Punjabi refugees who instead of creating a market and molding the taste of people overtly bethralled themselves for catering to taste and poor choice of people. With no serious writing in script making or any subjective research on board Indian films though technically ade hupt suffered continuously from lack of intellectual and creative thought in their celluloid while in due time the film making technology completely circumvented good story writing. 

In season 5 of Game of Thrones, the Indian subsidiary of Prana Studios designed the "set and crowd extensions". This massive task was executed in partnership with an American visual animation studio, Rhythm and Hues.

This isn't the first Indian VFX company that has left a noticeable mark on Hollywood biggies. Hollywood movies are increasingly depending on Indian VFX firms. One name that particularly stands out is Prime Focus, an Indian VFX studio that won this year's Oscar for Best Visual Effects in Interstellar.

Cinema like Interstellar or Gravity or any hard science fiction films cannot be made without any logistical input provided by respected scientist or author on story board. Interstellar had theoretical physicist Kip Thorpe as Scientific Consultant, just as Contact made in (1997) had Carl Sagan an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist. Stanly Kubrick subcontracted N.A.S.A scientists Frederick Ordway III and Harry Lange for his “ODYSSEY”. James Cameron hired USC professor and linguist Dr. Paul Frommer to engineer the dialect for aliens in his epic adventure Avatar (2010) from scratch, resulting in a respectable, self-sufficient vocabulary of about a thousand words bound by a consistent sound system, grammar and syntax .Similarly NASA Astronaut Cady Coleman gave valuable insight to Sandra bullock for her role in Gravity the space epic came in 2014 .These hired expert serves as the guide path in these ambitious projects accomplish by big cinema studios which are solely established by big corporate mafia of Americas who make insidious alignment with their state to sell an Idea and soft power agenda of their country.

Khaleesi's dragons in Game of Thrones were born in India! Yes, they were conceptualised in Goregaon, Mumbai, by the Indian arm of an LA-based 3D, animation and visual effects company, Prana Studios, with a brief as simple as this: "Create not just creatures, but characters."
And so the work began. Over 800 visual experts, artists, animators, sound managers, and technology specialists got their heads together to create three massive characters that are Khaleesi's dragons - Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion.

 
According to Peter Jackson, Oscar-winning visionary behind ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and recently ‘District 9’ truly quoted “Every once in a while, we will see a movie that transcends cultural barriers, genre and taste—a film that lives on in the minds of the audience, years after the fact, a film with a story, characters and dialogue so memorable that it creates its own mythology,”. 

Now their popular cinema is accentuating on stories where infra human power and capability are enhanced up to the unchallenged level of enormousness and normal human beings are turning into super hero by using ultra secrete power gadgets. These sharpest, innovative, larger than awe inspiring gadgets and accessories are just pointing towards the possibilities and very soon going to be used as proximate strategy which human (read as west military technology) is surely going to employ against their adversaries .In other words our future world belongs to people achieving Batman and Spider man kind of simulated capabilities for dominating a world. These movies can be easily discarded as commercial escapist but they are surely posing a motivational rough map in front of young aspiring Anglo Saxon scientists and academics to work for supplementing muscular depth and teeth to their military and intelligence. The possibility can not be ruled out.

NASA Astronaut Cady Coleman gave valuable insight to Sandra bullock for her role in Gravity the space epic came in 2014

Narendra Modi proudly announced that the cost incurred on Mangalyan project was less than half of movie Gravity however the cost of not producing and cinematicaly shying to explore and popularize the idea of hard science on our young mind through films will cost incalculably expensive for our civilization than some million finance incurred on movies like Gravity and Interstellar .Its time that our film fraternity set its priority right otherwise we Indians will always be on strategic back foot and will be living in future getting continuously “astonished” and “overwhelmed” by watching American military technology doing “adventures” in our world . So when we are going to see our own district 9?. Probably when our filmmakers and ISRO scientist sitting together discussing about possible script for executing any science epic adventure on celluloid (of course along with song and dance that’s not going anywhere!) 

Prime Focus Studio Mumbai Over  80,000 square-foot Mumbai facility houses seven theaters and thousands of VFX, 3D conversion and Animation seats, and also offers a complete slate of post production services. It is one of the largest, busiest and most technologically advanced facilities in Asia, and works directly with six other facilities throughout India, including  key hubs in Chandigarh, Hyderabad and Goa, that house an additional 1,500 plus artists and members of our global production teams.