I went into the theatre thinking this was a 4k remastered re-release and not just simply releasing before the sequel. If there was any remastering done on this, it seems terrible. Even without my experience as a QC tech for films, I could've noticed a lot of digital conversion errors in it, just wouldn't know what those things were. There were also a lot of places where the picture quality dropped drastically. Did they lose all the good film prints or something? There were some scenes where the vfx was clearly the reason why the picture quality was dropping too.
Coming to the movie itself, even though I've never watched the movie itself, I've always kind of known the story and have seen some scenes here and there. So it was a surprise that most of the good parts of the movie were actually everything I already knew and the rest was pretty shallow and cringe. So, the movie was actually even more outdated than I thought it would be. The comedy scenes don't work. The music is out of place and not exactly for my taste. But even after saying all this, I can't say I didn't enjoy the movie. A lot of it was like watching Annyan before Annyan, so got to give credit for that. Kamal Hassan has an effect that just makes everything better. It is a proper masala film of the time that is beautiful to look at. Even though the songs didn't have a place, it was really nice to watch on the big screen.
The best portion of the movie has got to be the pre-independence flashback scenes. Even though those scenes were also over the top, they still felt more genuine than the younger Kamal Haasan scenes in the movie. It was also good at showing things daringly within limits and even though the dialogues said some things, the visuals communicated it to be more which worked great. The character motivations for both the Kamal Haasan characters were pretty well written even though all the other characters are paper thin, with a dialogue here or there to make them work enough. There may be a bit of my convincing myself that this is a good film to a certain point that it worked for me so much, despite all of its problems.
I don't really have much expectations for the sequel, but I want at least the politics part to be properly updated to the current situations.
