Personally, as an American with limited exposure to Bollywood I liked LOVE STORY 2050. I thought Harman Baweja and Priyanka Chopra were appealing leads, who acquitted themselves very well as a couple who had fallen so deeply in love they would battle time and space to be together. I also enjoyed the crazy genius scientist uncle, who seemed to be auditioning to be the next Doctor Who - his lab even resembled some of those rooms in the TARDIS you never get to see! Unusually, the two cute kids not only didn't send me into insulin shock, their presence actually gave the hero's pursuit of his possibly-reincarnated love added poignancy.
Sure it was *way* overlong, some story elements made no sense to me, and it was packed full of distracting sub-plots - but so has *every* Bollywood movie I've seen so far. I see there's a lot of negative reviews here from Indian film fans and people with more experience of and discerning taste in Indian cinema than I have - so maybe it's that everything "Bollywood" is so exotic to me that I find even weak examples exciting, in much the same way that casual viewers of American action movies wouldn't recognize that anything starring Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris were steaming piles of Right-Wing racist BS.
The special effects were surprisingly well-done, and I'm guessing much more expensive than is usual for Bollywood - even if the view of the year 2050 is laughably clichéd. Baweja's dancing skills aren't as good as I'm used to seeing in similar films, and his moves suggest a martial artist rather than a dancer. Sure, I could have done w/out the two "cute robots", or the dropped subplot of Karan's distant corporate boss father - I had kind of hoped the film would expand on that, actually, and suggest that Karan's initially reckless behavior was his way of coping with grief over his mother's death, while remaining aloof and focused on work was his father's.
Oh, and WTF was the villainous Dr. Hoshi there, other than to add some action scenes - and who *was* he, anyway? An alternate embittered version of Karan who never persuaded his uncle to go into the future, given over to the Dark Side? Karan's otherwise-absent father - which, since he sort of resembled a Darth Vader knockoff, might have actually been funny? The hate-filled ghost of Sana, who never forgave Karan for not going back in time and stopping her death? Or is he just another of those random-to-outsiders Bollywood story elements that make sense to regular viewers?
Anyway, I and my friends and family, none of us serious scholars of Bollywood or even long-time fans, liked this movie a lot. If you're like us, you might too.
Sure it was *way* overlong, some story elements made no sense to me, and it was packed full of distracting sub-plots - but so has *every* Bollywood movie I've seen so far. I see there's a lot of negative reviews here from Indian film fans and people with more experience of and discerning taste in Indian cinema than I have - so maybe it's that everything "Bollywood" is so exotic to me that I find even weak examples exciting, in much the same way that casual viewers of American action movies wouldn't recognize that anything starring Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris were steaming piles of Right-Wing racist BS.
The special effects were surprisingly well-done, and I'm guessing much more expensive than is usual for Bollywood - even if the view of the year 2050 is laughably clichéd. Baweja's dancing skills aren't as good as I'm used to seeing in similar films, and his moves suggest a martial artist rather than a dancer. Sure, I could have done w/out the two "cute robots", or the dropped subplot of Karan's distant corporate boss father - I had kind of hoped the film would expand on that, actually, and suggest that Karan's initially reckless behavior was his way of coping with grief over his mother's death, while remaining aloof and focused on work was his father's.
Oh, and WTF was the villainous Dr. Hoshi there, other than to add some action scenes - and who *was* he, anyway? An alternate embittered version of Karan who never persuaded his uncle to go into the future, given over to the Dark Side? Karan's otherwise-absent father - which, since he sort of resembled a Darth Vader knockoff, might have actually been funny? The hate-filled ghost of Sana, who never forgave Karan for not going back in time and stopping her death? Or is he just another of those random-to-outsiders Bollywood story elements that make sense to regular viewers?
Anyway, I and my friends and family, none of us serious scholars of Bollywood or even long-time fans, liked this movie a lot. If you're like us, you might too.