Future Shock

Love Story 2050 (2008) is Bollywood’s first big budget futuristic sci fi special effects extravaganza. Naturally, the movie manages to steal something from just about every big Hollywood sci-fi epic of the last fifteen years, but most importantly, it adapts 2002’s The Time Machine by completely removing any trace of the original Wells novel.

Karan Malhotra (Harman Baweja) is a good looking adrenaline junkie from Sydney with a dead mother, a wealthy but emotionally distant father, and an overly developed sense of self pity, so it’s clear that deep down, he just wants to be loved. And then he meets Sana (Priyanka Chopra), a sweet, shy student who loves poetry and pink and long walks in the rain, and it’s even more clear by whom Karan wants to be loved.

Karan pursues Sana with all the subtlety of a starving pit bull on steak night. Sana rejects his every advance until, suddenly, she doesn’t, and she’s giddy with love and talking to hand puppets.


When the time comes for Sana to return home, she asks Karan to meet her at the train station. He refuses, because he’s an idiot, but changes his mind at the last second, rushing to the station just in time to see her departing train. Since the two lovebirds never got around to exchanging addresses or phone numbers or email, he has no idea where she’s going, until a passing butterfly shows him which town she’s going to. (And no, I am not making this up.

Karan happens to have an uncle in the area, the brilliant scientist Yatin Khanna (Boman Irani), so he has somewhere to stay while searching for his lost love. And then he finds her, and goes to meet the family; Sana’s father is a little suspicious, but her mother (Archana Puran Singh, here gleefully doing the Archana Puran Singh thing) thinks that Karan is literally a gift from God, sent to show the neighbors that her daughter really does like boys after all, thank you very much. Before long the match is made and Uncle Ya, who is an astrologer as well as a scientist, is checking the couple’s horoscopes. And then Sana is killed in a traffic accident.

Everyone is devastated, but particularly Karan. However, Uncle Ya has just completed his time machine, and it works! Karan fixates on the idea of traveling into the future to find Sana in her next incarnation, rather than just going back in time to prevent the accident, so Karan and Uncle Ya (along with Sana’s little brother and sister, who stow away on the machine) travel to the Mumbai . . . of the future! (The flying car and robot future, that is, not the one with all the Morlocks.)

The world of 2050 is a very different place, thanks in large part to the inventions of the brilliant Doctor Yatin Khanna. Still, the time travelers manage; they quickly befriend robot girl QT, and with her help they soon have access to a house, fake ID chips, and futuristic clothes. (It helps that Australian dollars are apparently rare and incredibly valuable collectors items in 2050.) As for Sana herself, she’s been reborn as the cynical and sultry Zeisha, Mumbai’s top pop star.

The time machine will automatically return to the present in 30 days, so Karan has about a month to woo a major celebrity and convince her to abandon everything she’s ever known in order to join him in the primitive world of 2008, all while avoiding the mostly off screen villiany of Doctor Hoshi, 2050’s most successful evil super powered masked scientist. Fortunately, QT has befriended Boo, Zeisha’s robot teddy bear/personal assistant, who falls somewhere between Jar-Jar Binks and Ruby Rhod on the Unified Anoying Sci-Fi Sidekick Scale, though she’s more useful than either.

Love Story 2050 has some good points: the film looks fantastic, Archana Puran Singh is delightfully over the top as Sana’s filmi Maa, and Uncle Ya gives a very reasonable explanation of why reincarnated characters in movies always look just like their past lives, an explanation which neatly covers every Bollywood reincarnation movie apart from Karz. The plotting is incredibly sloppy, however; it’s as if the writiers started with a list of Hollywood scenes they wanted to rip off, and then built the movie around that. The children literally do not affect the plot in any way, which is probably a good thing, but Doctor Hoshi, the alleged villain, is almost as superfluous, serving only to enable the requisite flying car chase. And the Asimov reading middle schooler in me died a little when QT explained the Three Laws of Robotics. (”We don’t harm humans! We love humans! We serve humans! And we love kids, too.”)

Love Story 2050 is worth watching, but mostly as a curiosity. It may be a paper thin narrative wrapped around a not particularly compelling romance, but it’s the paper thin narrative of the future!