Ayalaan Movie Review : An enjoyable sci-fi entertainer with a local flavour

Ayalaan Movie Synopsis: An alien has to team up with a good-hearted young man to stop a ruthless industrialist, whose project might lead to the destruction of the planet.

Ayalaan Movie Review: In Indru Netru Naalai, director Ravikumar gave a local flavour to the high-concept of time travel. In Ayalaan, too, he does the same... taking a sci-fi premise about alien on Earth and presenting it as a distinctly Tamil movie. We get the Tamil cinema must-haves - hero introduction song, romance, a couple of comedians as the hero's sidekicks, a corporate villain, played by an actor from the north (here, it's Sharad Kelkar), a pinch of mother sentiment and even messages about organic farming. The last bit was a staple of big-hero films from 2015-20, the period in which this film was under production, and has gone out of fashion of late, but surprisingly, it doesn't feel dated or forced here, given that the core theme is all about saving the planet.

It is the twists that Ravikumar gives to concepts that we have seen in several Hollywood films - superpowers, UFOs, extra-terrestrials, powerful robots, femme fatales, large-scale destruction - that makes Ayalaan an entertainer for all ages. In the first half, he uses the alien, called Tattoo, like a cute cartoon character, generating wonder and humour, thereby appealing to kids and the kids within adults. The fact that the visual effects are largely seamless only adds to the magic - the filmmaking complements the imagination we see in the writing, which niftily keeps bringing back characters and elements we were introduced to in the first half in effective ways in the second to further the narrative.

But the film does have its issues. The scene transitions doesn't happen in a smooth manner, the villain doesn't seem deadly enough, and some of the moments in the second half, like a chase on a highway (even AR Rahman's score is generic here) and the climax, could have done with a bit more punch. But right when things seem to be getting a bit underwhelming, we get moments that are pretty exciting to longer too much on the things that don't work.