Are we sci-fi ready?

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: Science fiction has a sadly short history in Bollywood, thinly stretching across Shekhar Kapoor’s Mr India, Rakesh Roshan’s Koi…Mil Gaya and Krrish to forthcoming flicks like Shankar’s Robot. Now, with Love Story 2050 having bombed at the box office, what’s the future of the genre in India?

Komal Nahta, editor of the Film Street Journal, predicts: “Our industry has a herd mentality, flocking around successful formulas. The flopping of 2050 means that filmmakers will now be less likely to work on sci-fi projects.” On the other hand, as shown by “the very good weekend collections raked in by the Hollywood biggie The Dark Knight, which has broken all opening box office records out in the US, our tastes are becoming more international.” Independent filmmaker and Jamia Millia Islamia professor B Diwakar also thinks, “people are becoming more open to non-traditional work.”

But both Nahta and Diwakar underline that what's crucial is a film's emotional connect. Saying that Harry Baweja's film has no heart, Nahta contrasts its sentiment deficit to Mr India and Koi…Mil Gaya: “Anil Kapoor went around feeding hungry kids and Hrithik Roshan played a sick guy uplifted by superpowers. That’s very lovable and strikes an emotional chord with us.”

In Hollywood, it’s been a summer of sci-fi blockbusters and comicbook heroes like Hancock and Iron Man. Does director Harry Baweja offer anything that is unique to 2050? He says that “the dancing robots and the floating dance stage, nobody has ever seen those before.” Add on the aircars, hoverbikes, rotund residential modules half sunk in the sea, teleporters and so on, and you understand why he sees 2050 as a milestone.

Baweja is very disappointed by Indian critics: “They keep complaining that we don’t risk working with new ideas, but when we do, they go on a rampage. Do they even have the training to value all the hard work that goes into rendering a special effects scene, to appreciate how our film has brought Bollywood online with Hollywood standards?” The climactic chase sequence for instance was finalised at the Rising Sun studios, linked to projects like Warner Brothers’ Chronicles of Narnia. The talking teddy Boo, which Priyanka Chopra insisted on taking home because he was “the cutest creature on earth,” was designed by John Cox who has an Oscar in his kitty.