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RRR poster

RRR

2022 · S. S. Rajamouli

For when you want a maximum-voltage crowd-pleaser — movie night with friends, the loudest speakers you own, and zero cynicism. Total comfort, delivered at total scale.

What it's about

In 1920s India under the British Raj, two strangers on secret, opposing missions — one hunting a stolen girl, one hunting rebels — become inseparable friends without knowing they're destined to collide. It's a fictional history imagining a bond between two real revolutionaries who never met, told at a scale where a rescue can involve a bridge, a fire, and most of the animal kingdom.

The experience

Three hours of pure, escalating exhilaration — sincere to its bones, operatic in its reversals, with action sequences that make you laugh out loud at their audacity and a friendship that somehow makes you cry between explosions. Exhausting in the best way.

Performances

NTR Jr. and Ram Charan play the two leads as elemental forces — water and fire — with a physical commitment and open-hearted chemistry that carries every impossible thing the film asks you to believe.

The craft

S. S. Rajamouli directs with a sincerity and scale Hollywood abandoned decades ago: musical numbers that function as duels, an interval-structured screenplay that detonates its reversals with operatic timing, and effects deployed for delight rather than realism. This is a big-screen, big-sound film if there ever was one — the dance number alone justifies the volume.

Why it matters

Its worldwide crossover was unprecedented for a Telugu production, winning the Oscar for the song 'Naatu Naatu' and introducing a global audience to Indian blockbuster cinema on its own terms.

Reception & legacy: how RRR was received, argued over, and remembered →

S. S. Rajamouli's Telugu-language colossus imagines a friendship between two real anti-colonial revolutionaries — Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju — who never met, and builds from that counterfactual a three-hour delirium of loyalty, betrayal, and physics-optional spectacle set against the British Raj of the 1920s. Rajamouli, already the most commercially successful director in India after the Baahubali films, works in a register Hollywood abandoned decades ago: total sincerity at maximum scale, where a musical number can be a duel and an action sequence can carry the emotional weight of an aria. NTR Jr. and Ram Charan play the leads as elemental forces — water and fire, the film tells us plainly — and the interval-structured screenplay detonates its reversals with operatic timing. Its worldwide crossover was unprecedented for a Telugu production, culminating in an Academy Award for the song 'Naatu Naatu' and dance floors full of Western audiences learning the hook step. Beneath the mayhem sits a pointed rewriting of colonial history as myth — the empire, for once, cast as the monster.

Lines of influence