In today’s world of online streaming, where the viewers are exposed to grand visuals from Hollywood, it takes a lot of courage to make an outer space sci-fi in a local language with its limited budget. For that, a huge applause is deserved by Director Shakti Soundar Rajan, Jayam Ravi and rest of the crew. As the end credit rolls showed, all of them have put in enormous effort in making this film. ISRO has been doing a phenomenal work with their Chandrayaan and Mangalyaan missions, but we need to go beyond it, be able to do manned missions – for that we need our young kids to be imagining and dreaming about space exploration – films like this if they can spark those fires, I am all for it.

If you have seen the trailer of tik tik tik (2018), you would’ve got the plot –  a huge asteroid is on course to crash over South India, which will kill 4 Crore (40 Million) people and wipe away half of the land mass here – the plan is to steal from a Chinese space station which has the world’s (!) largest nuclear missile capable of blasting the asteroid. The panic and urgency that is showed by everyone in the war room while facing a similar disaster in the Bruce Willis super hit film Armageddon (1998 film) is completely missing in Tik Tik Tik. Here, the misfit recruits are wiling away the time by drinking and their leader played by Jayam Ravi proves his mettle by opening a super-secure titanium safe with a paper cone!

The word “China” is “beeped” throughout, probably on the orders of the Censor Board of India, making it awkward listening to the dialogues – when we get to see Chinese origin people on screen and Chinese characters everywhere, how does it help by beeping the word?

From the time the song “Kurumba“, an excellent melody by D Imman and soul-stirring lyrics by Karky was released, I have been listening to it in play loops – with Jayam Ravi‘s own son Aarav Ravi playing the son’s role on screen, I was expecting an emotional treat – unfortunately, by not providing a background to both the father and son’s character the visuals come out uninspiring. While in Armageddon, in the end, we see what a gigantic man Bruce Willis’ character turns out to be, because of his selfless sacrifice; here in Tik Tik Tik, we see Jayam Ravi‘s character to be an ordinary Kollywood Hero who is the only intelligent and capable man standing throughout.

For the first attempt in this genre, the animation work and imagination were fine, but the film falls short on the screenplay – had the Director worked hard on this fundamental part of any movie, he could’ve got the whole country take notice of this film.

Overall, to encourage variety in Tamil films, please go and watch this film with your young kids, they are sure to be enjoying it.

Ramesh Thilak, Vincent Asokan, Jayam Ravi, Nivetha Pethuraj & Arjunan

Ramesh Thilak, Vincent Asokan, Jayam Ravi, Nivetha Pethuraj & Arjunan

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