Satria Dewa: Gatotkaca

When I sat down to watch the 2022 Indonesian action movie "Satria Dewa: Gatotkaca", here late in 2022, it was without ever having heard about the movie. But given my fascinatio and love of the Asian cinema, of course I needed no persuasion to sit down and give this movie a chance.

And I will say that "Satria Dewa: Gatotkaca" was actually entertaining enough, and writers Rahabi Mandra, Hanung Bramantyo and Tesadesrada Ryza did put together a good enough script and storyline here. However, I don't feel that the movie was really outstanding as per se, and there are far better Indonesian action movies out there. But it was entertaining enough, though I personally don't understand why they opted to turn the movie into a strange hybrid mix of superhero movie and "Mortal Kombat" towards the end, it was a rather strange change of direction for the overall feel of the movie.

I was, for the majority of the actors and actresses on the cast list, not familiar with the talents that starred in "Satria Dewa: Gatotkaca". In fact, the only familiar face to me here was Yayan Ruhian (playing Beceng), and he is always a nice addition to any movie.

Something that worked well in favor of director Hanung Bramantyo's movie was the action sequences and the special effects. There was quite a lot of action in the movie, and it was nicely choreographed and executed on the screen, which added a lot of enjoyment to the movie. And the special effects were quite surprisingly good for an Indonesian movie.

While "Satria Dewa: Gatotkaca" was entertaining enough, it is hardly a movie that I will ever return to watch a second time though.

My rating of "Satria Dewa: Gatotkaca" lands on a five out of ten stars.

Watching the action scene makes me headache theres too much cut to cut clip, i cant focus and its hard to figure out what are they doing.

I know, that particular way of editing is to help the action scene to cover bad movement etc but in my opinion they were doing it too much.

I dont know who's responsible for this, but for a superhero movie i think the action part is one of the biggest factor people would watch.

And i think they could've done much better for the choreography, i thought this character would have a superstrength kinda like power, that the fight will full with breaking walls and stuff intead of just ordinary martial art fighting, i think the choregrapher should've work more on the imagination of the power of the superhero, and not just a choreofighting.

Might be a good start for a studio name satria dewa, but please fix this movie, i dont have a problem with the visual effect, the problem is with the music and the story, the story was uninteresting and the music was so dramatic. When will indonesian superhero movie will be good? What im saying this movie isn't bad or good, its like low average.

The movie starts out okay, then slowly hitting rock bottom in terms of film quality. I wish the Quinn character would just fall from that bridge and plummet down to her agonizing death. No character development whatsoever. Cringe dialogue throughout the movie and for God sake, the product placement ruins the experience for me. The CG is okay, I only like the last part of the whole movie, when gatot fights beceng in their final super hero forms. That was the only redeeming quality in the whole movie. I'm surprised why hanung chose to have the product placement in his first superhero movie. It's just so unecessary and ruins the film.

The concept of this superhero universe is promising, combining ancient Javanese mythology into modern society. This potential concept was blown away by rushing the stories, mediocre directing, unnecessary characters, and awfully product placement.

The writers put too many things in the storyline resulting in a fast-paced and no emotional attachment story. I can't feel/empathize with the character's emotions and feelings. Sometimes relationships among characters appear out of nowhere, like the romantic feelings between the main character. This movie should focus more on how Yuda struggles to live his life while taking care of his mother and finding his true self-identity. Leave the in-universe world-building later on in other films.

As a new genre for Hanung Bramantyo as the director (and Indonesia's film industry), it is understandable that he is still not used to directing this genre. But he should be able to give a better performance than this.

The second most annoying part of this movie is two characters are really unnecessary, Quinn and Gege. They don't serve any important role, they don't contribute anything to the plot, and their dialogues are only saying something outloud and most of the time not related to the context of the scene. An important note is maybe Gege's character like that could be justified because he is a child. If these two characters were removed from the movie I'm sure nothing would be affected.

The last problem for me with this movie is how they place advertisements. The majority of the food and drink product placement is ok, not good, but in some ways is acceptable. On the other hand, the online marketplace advertisement is so weird. Why would someone create a dedicated scene with a completely unknown character who throws dirty/NSFW jokes just to advertise some online marketplace? This scene and the jokes made me cringe at best.

There is also a questionable plot hole in this movie regarding how Yuda's friends came to the final battlefield. But maybe it can be explained later.

In conclusion, this movie, Satria Dewa: Gatot Kaca needs to fix a lot of things to be able called a good/decent movie. Regardless of all the flaws in this movie I still appreciate the cast and the crews who work on this movie, they were all brave to take the challenge of creating a movie with a genre that is not popular enough in Indonesia's film industry. I also encourage anyone who reads this review to give this movie a chance and watch it in the cinema to support our local movie industry. I hope Satria Dewa Studio take lessons from their first movie, good job!