Ramayana: Rise of a Legend review – India’s most expensive film ever becomes spectacular, huge-scale epic

Based on the ancient classical poem about Rama, the avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, this three-hour blockbuster is highly enjoyable

Here is a thoroughly engaging, rousing and spectacular Indian epic melodrama from director Nitesh Tiwari, with music by Hans Zimmer and AR Rahman, based on the ancient classical poem about Rama, the avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. It has often been adapted for live-action and animated movies in the past, though surely not on this scale, the current three-hour blockbuster being only the first half. (There are no musical numbers though.) The idea of aristocrats submitting stoically and yet playfully to exile in the forest has something Shakespearean about it, and if you are suffering from Homer-withdrawal after Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a story about the noble Prince…