Satria Dewa: Gatotkaca

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!