Spectacle Over Story: Is Indian Cinema Asking VFX to Do the Work of Storytelling?
There may be no more revealing test of Indian cinema’s relationship with spectacle than Ramayana: Part 1.
Here is a story that has survived for millennia without a single pixel of computer-generated imagery.
Generations have carried it through oral tradition, poetry, scripture, theatre, dance, painting, television, cinema, bedtime stories and collective memory.
Why?
Not because audiences needed to see Lanka rendered in photorealistic detail.
Not because armies needed to stretch beyond the horizon.
Not because Hanuman’s leap across the ocean needed to satisfy the laws of digital physics.
The Ramayana endured because beneath its extraordinary mythology lies something profoundly human.
Duty. Love. Exile. Loyalty. Temptation. Sacrifice. Devotion. Loss. Power. Righteousness.
And the consequences of human choice.
That is why the forthcoming Ramayana: Part 1 presents such a fascinating test for contemporary Indian filmmaking.
Today, filmmakers possess technological capabilities that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Worlds can be constructed. Mythological beings brought to life. Celestial weapons unleashed. Armies multiplied. Oceans crossed. Kingdoms rebuilt.
We may finally possess the technology to show this world at extraordinary scale.
But that raises a more important question:
Will technology help a new generation experience why this story endured for millennia—or merely show them what it might have looked like?
We cannot answer that from a trailer. Nor should we prejudge an unreleased film from marketing material designed, understandably, to emphasize scale and theatrical spectacle.
But Ramayana gives us a doorway into a larger question confronting Indian cinema.
Not:
Are we using too much VFX?
But:
What storytelling work are we asking VFX to do?
Because the problem is not VFX.
The problem begins when spectacle is asked to perform work that story, character, conflict, emotion and meaning must perform first.
The Rise—and Seduction—of Spectacle
Indian cinema did not suddenly discover spectacle.
Grand sets, enormous stars, elaborate song sequences, battles, mythological worlds and larger-than-life imagery have been part of its cinematic vocabulary for generations.
What has changed is the economic importance of spectacle.
For today's major tentpole, scale is increasingly not merely something inside the film.
Scale becomes part of the film's commercial proposition.
Bigger budget.
Bigger star.
Bigger universe.
Bigger action.
Bigger visual effects.
Bigger opening.
The logic is understandable.
A contemporary blockbuster must begin competing for our attention months before we enter a theatre.
Its first battlefield may not even be the cinema screen.
It is the scroll.
A poster must stop the thumb.
A teaser must generate conversation.
A trailer must trend.
A star entrance must become an event.
A frame must become shareable.
An action sequence must promise an experience audiences believe demands the biggest screen available.
And spectacle possesses an extraordinary commercial advantage:
It can be marketed before it can be felt.
A collapsing building communicates instantly.
A supernatural weapon communicates instantly.
A thousand-person army communicates instantly.
A star walking through flames communicates instantly.
Character development does not.
An evolving relationship does not.
Moral conflict does not.
Theme does not.
Meaning does not.
Those require time.
And therein lies one of modern blockbuster cinema's most consequential tensions:
The things easiest to market before a movie are not necessarily the things that make the movie worth remembering afterward.
The economics can therefore begin influencing the grammar of filmmaking itself.
Films accumulate marketable moments.
The hero reveal.
The transformation.
The impossible stunt.
The creature.
The explosion.
The cameo.
The interval reveal.
The climactic confrontation.
Again, none of these is inherently problematic. Great movies have always contained memorable moments.
The danger begins when the causal relationship reverses.
Instead of the story generating extraordinary moments, the story becomes connective tissue carrying us from one predetermined extraordinary moment to another.
A movie, however, is not merely an assembly of moments.
It is an accumulation of experience.
And VFX is particularly seductive inside this system because it is visible.
A producer can see a completed effects shot.
A studio can track how many shots remain.
A VFX supervisor can measure rendering, compositing and delivery.
Investors can see the world taking shape.
Marketing teams can cut those images into promotional material.
Everyone can point toward the screen and say:
“Look what we are building.”
Narrative depth is more elusive.
Nobody gathers around a monitor because a protagonist's motivation has become more coherent.
There is no spectacular rendering of a stronger emotional arc.
Character depth cannot easily be displayed on a production dashboard.
A more meaningful climax may emerge because writers spent weeks reconsidering a choice nobody outside the story room will ever see.
This creates an asymmetry.
VFX production often resembles construction from a blueprint already drawn.
Storytelling resembles excavation guided by imagination—digging into character, contradiction, desire, fear, relationships, culture, moral conflict and human truth.
One produces increasingly visible evidence of progress.
The other can look uncertain almost until it works.
No wonder spectacle seduces.
But technological capability creates a responsibility of its own.
Once the question “Can we do this?” can increasingly be answered with yes, filmmakers must confront the harder question:
“Should we?”
And even more importantly:
“Why?”
What VFX Can—and Cannot—Do
Let us give visual effects the credit they deserve.
VFX has expanded the vocabulary of cinema almost beyond imagination.
It can reconstruct worlds that no longer exist.
Create worlds that never existed.
Make the microscopic enormous and the cosmic intimate.
Take audiences beneath oceans, across galaxies, through impossible landscapes and into realms previously accessible only through imagination.
For Indian storytelling, the possibilities are exhilarating.
Our mythology alone contains astras, divine manifestations, flying vehicles, supernatural beings, enchanted landscapes, shape-shifters, cosmic forces and epic battles.
VFX gives filmmakers extraordinary new means to render that imagination cinematically.
But technological possibility makes the division of labor more important, not less.
VFX can make almost anything visible. Storytelling determines whether what becomes visible matters.
At its best, VFX does three things extraordinarily well:
It visualizes.
It transforms imagination into sensory experience.
It amplifies.
It takes something already carrying dramatic meaning—fear, wonder, danger, isolation, power, hope—and enlarges our experience of it.
It immerses.
At its best, it makes us stop evaluating the technology altogether. We accept the world, its creatures, its geography and its rules and begin participating emotionally in what is happening.
But there are things VFX cannot independently manufacture.
It cannot make us care about a character we have never been given reason to care about.
It cannot manufacture stakes simply by destroying more things.
It cannot create meaning simply by making something larger.
And it cannot manufacture resonance by increasing sensory intensity.
A visual-effects artist can create a tear.
Storytelling must make us understand why it falls.
VFX can create an army.
Storytelling must make us fear what happens if it arrives.
VFX can destroy a kingdom.
Storytelling must make us mourn its destruction.
VFX can make Hanuman cross an ocean.
Storytelling must make us understand the devotion that makes the crossing meaningful.
This is why spectacle and emotional experience operate differently:
Attention is captured in moments.
Emotion accumulates across moments.
Meaning emerges from the connections between them.
Resonance is what remains afterward.
VFX can be exceptionally good at capturing attention.
It can contribute magnificently to everything that follows.
But storytelling must build the journey.
A thousand soldiers charging toward someone we love can be terrifying.
A thousand soldiers charging toward someone we barely know can merely be impressive.
The pixels may be identical.
The audience experience is not.
Which gives us perhaps the simplest Story-First doctrine for visual effects:
Don't ask VFX to create the emotion. Give it an emotion worth amplifying.
Four Films. Four Relationships With Spectacle.
So let us put the proposition under pressure.
Not by asking whether these films contain too much VFX.
Instead:
What storytelling work is the spectacle actually doing?
Brahmāstra: Building the World
The ambition of Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva deserves acknowledgment.
Ayan Mukerji attempted to create a contemporary fantasy universe drawing from Indian mythological concepts and astras at a scale rarely attempted in mainstream Hindi cinema.
The spectacle performs legitimate storytelling work.
It visualizes the mythology.
Fire, energy and supernatural powers create a vocabulary for the Astraverse. Abstract ideas become tangible. A world begins to exist.
But the Story-First question becomes:
Does the human world develop as powerfully as the visual one?
Shiva's relationship with fire, for example, offers something much richer than a visual-effects opportunity.
What does fire mean to him?
What does possessing this power reveal about him?
Does it frighten him? Define him? Isolate him? Transform his relationships? Expose an internal contradiction?
The more those questions matter, the more dramatically powerful the visual effect becomes.
Otherwise, we can understand increasingly more about how the universe works while still wanting to understand more deeply why the person at its center matters.VFX can make mythology visible.
Story must make mythology personal.
Pathaan: Amplifying the Contract
Pathaan makes a different bargain with its audience.
This is a star-driven spy-action adventure built around propulsion, charisma, danger, hero-versus-antagonist conflict and enormous set pieces.
Its VFX therefore has a different assignment.
Enhance danger.
Increase velocity.
Expand environments.
Make physical jeopardy spectacular.
Activate the audience's pre-existing emotional investment in its stars and characters.
And much of the spectacle serves precisely that entertainment contract.
That matters because Story-First does not mean every film must become solemn, psychologically dense or philosophically profound.
Sometimes the intended experience is exhilaration.
The question is whether filmmaking choices serve that intended audience experience.
But Pathaan also demonstrates the boundary. As action escalates into increasingly improbable feats, spectacle can move from dramatic necessity toward genre expectation.
That may still entertain.
But entertainment and resonance are not identical objectives.
Jawan: Giving Spectacle Something to Carry
Then consider Jawan.
It is maximalist.
Star-driven.
Fast.
Loud.
Packed with action, entrances, transformations, weapons, vehicles and explosions.
Yet reducing it to spectacle misses something important.
Behind many of those set pieces are farmers, patients, mothers, prisoners, soldiers, corruption, institutional failures, family relationships, justice, revenge and redemption.
Some are rendered broadly. Some are unabashedly melodramatic.
But they give the spectacle something to carry.
When action arrives after injustice has been dramatized, the punch means something different.
The audience may not merely be responding to kinetic energy.
They may also be responding to:
“Someone is finally doing something about this.”
Now spectacle carries emotional and social information already encoded by the story.
The visual event and dramatic event begin becoming the same event.
That is amplification.
Adipurush: The Deeper Warning
And then there is Adipurush.
If our diagnosis stops at “the VFX was bad,” we learn almost nothing.
So imagine the opposite.
Imagine flawless visual effects.
Photorealistic creatures.
Breathtaking Lanka.
Magnificent armies.
Seamless environments.
World-class animation and compositing.
Would that automatically have produced a great telling of the Ramayana?
Of course not.
Because the quality of the pixels was never the deepest question.
The human experience beneath them was.
The filmmakers inherited extraordinary dramatic material: exile, loyalty, abduction, grief, devotion, sacrifice, moral conflict, pride, duty, love and the consequences of power.
The profundity did not need to be manufactured.
It needed to be excavated.
Which leads to a crucial distinction for adaptation:
Plot fidelity is not emotional fidelity.
A filmmaker can reproduce the exile without making us feel its cost.
Show the abduction without making us experience the separation.
Show Hanuman without making us understand devotion.
Show the battle without allowing us to feel the moral collision beneath it.
Reproduce the recognizable events...
and still lose the experience that made those events endure.
That is an impossible problem for VFX to solve.
When Spectacle Disappears Into Story
We can see the opposite relationship in some of cinema's most celebrated effects-driven films.
In Jurassic Park, the T-Rex is a technological achievement.
But the attack works because Steven Spielberg makes it about vulnerability.
Children are trapped.
The adults who should protect them are separated from them.
The electric fence has failed.
Something enormous is approaching.
Technology visualizes the threat.
Story makes us fear it.
In The Lord of the Rings, Gollum was a landmark digital creation.
But audiences did not care about him because his skin texture was convincing.
They cared because inside that digital body lived desire, addiction, loneliness, manipulation, memory, shame and the remnants of Sméagol.
The effect made Gollum believable to the eye.
Character made him believable to the heart.
And in Dune, the sandworm is more than an enormous creature.
It carries ecology, culture, religion, danger, power and destiny.
Scale becomes thematic information.
The spectacle has a storytelling assignment.
That is the pattern.
Great VFX does not merely display.
It reveals.
And something almost paradoxical happens when filmmakers get this relationship right:
The audience should not merely ask, “How did they do that?” The deeper triumph is when they forget to ask—because they are too busy feeling what is happening.
The Story-First Test for VFX
So how might filmmakers test a major effects-driven sequence before the machinery becomes too difficult—and too expensive—to stop?
Perhaps nine questions are enough.
1. Story: Why does this sequence exist? What changes because it happens?
2. Character: Whose experience are we inside, and what does the sequence reveal or change about that person?
3. Emotion: What should the audience feel—and has the story earned that feeling?
4. Stakes: What can be lost, and why should that loss matter to us?
5. Meaning: Beneath its mechanics, what is this spectacle actually about?
6. Six Pillars: Is it Believable, Emotionally Engaging, Intellectually Compelling, Relevant, Meaningful, and accessible through a Universal Human Gateway?
7. Amplification: Complete the sentence: “The VFX in this sequence amplifies ______.” If the blank is difficult to fill, perhaps the dramatic signal has not yet been found.
8. Experience: What is all this becoming inside the audience? Are they merely watching the sequence grow bigger—or being moved somewhere emotionally?
9. Residue: When the explosion ends, the creature disappears, the army stops moving and the music falls silent—what remains?
Then perform one final thought experiment.
The Remove-the-VFX Test
Strip away the fire.
The creatures.
The digital armies.
The destruction.
The impossible environments.
The spectacle.
What remains?
Is there still a character we care about?
Conflict?
A meaningful choice?
Consequences?
Emotion?
Something worth saying?
If yes, build.
Render.
Simulate.
Composite.
Push the technology.
Show us something we have never seen before.
Because now the spectacle has something worth amplifying.
If not...
perhaps the next call should not yet be to the VFX department.
Perhaps it should be back to the story room.
After the Spectacle Is Gone
Which brings us back to Ramayana: Part 1.
Indian cinema should be ambitious.
Build worlds we have never seen.
Push technology.
Create images that make audiences around the world wonder how they were possible.
Give our mythology the cinematic scale its imagination has always possessed.
Let Hanuman cross the ocean.
Let Lanka rise before us.
Let astras illuminate the heavens.
Let armies stretch beyond the horizon.
Let Ravana possess a presence worthy of one of mythology's most formidable antagonists.
Astonish us.
But give us something worth remembering after the astonishment is gone.
Because Ramayana does not need VFX to make it great.
It has already survived for millennia without it.
What contemporary filmmaking technology offers is the opportunity to help another generation experience that greatness anew.
Do not merely show us Rama leaving Ayodhya.
Make us feel what it means for a son to walk away from everything that should have been his because he believes duty asks it of him.
Do not merely show us Sita choosing exile.
Let us experience the agency, love and courage within that choice.
Do not merely show us Hanuman leaping across an ocean.
Make us feel the devotion that makes the impossible possible.
Do not merely show us Ravana's magnificence.
Let us encounter the tragedy of brilliance and power corrupted by desire, pride and the inability to govern oneself.
And when Rama and Ravana finally stand against each other, do not merely give us a battle worthy of the budget.
Give us a culmination worthy of everything the story means.
Because this is where cinema ultimately lives.
Not inside the rendering engine.
Not inside the camera.
Not even entirely on the screen.
A movie does not ultimately exist on the screen. It exists in what the screen causes to happen inside the audience.
The screen contains images.
The audience experiences wonder.
The screen contains events.
The audience discovers meaning.
The screen contains choices.
The audience experiences consequences.
And when the screen finally goes dark, what continues to exist is whatever the audience carries away.
That is emotional residue.
That is resonance.
So perhaps the conversation should no longer be about whether Indian cinema has become too dependent upon VFX.
That question is too small.
The more exciting question is:
What becomes possible when India's growing technological capability meets equally rigorous storytelling craft?
Imagine that combination.
Our stories.
Our mythology.
Our history.
Our cultures.
Our languages.
Our music.
Our philosophical traditions.
Our extraordinary reservoir of human experience.
Combined with world-class filmmaking technology...
but governed by Story-First discipline.
Not technology replacing humanity.
Technology amplifying humanity.
Not spectacle replacing emotion.
Spectacle embodying emotion.
Not VFX asking us to care.
VFX magnifying what the story has already given us reason to care about.
That is not an argument for less ambitious Indian cinema.
It is an argument for greater ambition.
Perhaps Ramayana: Part 1 will accomplish exactly that.
We do not know yet.
A trailer cannot tell us, and an unreleased film deserves the opportunity to reveal the experience its filmmakers have created.
So this is not a prediction.
It is a hope.
A hope that one of humanity's oldest surviving stories receives not merely one of Indian cinema's most technologically ambitious adaptations...
but one of its most emotionally ambitious.
A hope that audiences unfamiliar with the Ramayana will not merely understand what happened, but understand why generations have cared.
And a hope that those who have carried these characters within them since childhood might encounter something deeply familiar...
and somehow feel it anew.
Perhaps that should be the benchmark.
Not:
Did they render the ocean convincingly?
But:
Did we feel the magnitude of the leap?
Not:
Was Lanka spectacular?
But:
Did we understand what was at stake inside it?
Not:
Was the final battle enormous?
But:
Did everything that came before make its outcome matter?
Not:
How many VFX shots did the film contain?
But:
How many made us feel something worth carrying home?
Build the worlds.
Raise the armies.
Create the impossible.
Push every technological boundary.
Make the screen magnificent.
But never forget what all that magnificence is ultimately for.
Because the greatest triumph of VFX will never be that we saw the impossible.
It will be that, for a few extraordinary hours, the impossible made us feel something profoundly human.
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