After ten years of hard work, Doctor Vasi (Rajnikanth) has finally completed his mechanical man, Chitti (also Rajnikath). After a brief interlude to win back the heart of his neglected girlfriend, Sana (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan), Vasi presents his creation to the world, and the world is impressed.
Things don’t go quite so well when Vasi’s colleagues at the university get the chance to examine Chitti. Nobody gets called mad (unfortunately), but when Vasi’s mentor Doctor Bohra (Danny Denzongpa) has the chance to run the robot through its paces, he declares that it’s too dangerous to be allowed to mix with people.
It’s true that Bohra is secretly evil; he’s building an army of killer robots in his basement which he’s hoping to sell to the highest bidder, and he’s consumed with jealousy over Vasi’s success. On the other hand, Bohra is also completely correct. Chitti obeys orders without question, but has no sense of context, no sense of restraint, and no sense of the value of human life. Vasi specifically did not install any form of Asimov’s laws because he hoped to give Chitti to the army, and a soldier might have to take human life. So Vasi has created a robot which could harm or even kill anyone at any time, just because his instructions were not clearly worded. Chitti is far too dangerous to be around people.
Vasi asks for one more chance, and Bohra gives him a month. Vasi decides that the best way to teach his robot about the subtleties of human society is to give it emotions (because we humans have emotions, and we don’t have any trouble getting along.) Thanks in part to a lucky lightning strike, he succeeds, and the new, improved Chitti promptly falls in love with Sana. Tensions mount as Chitti becomes more and more persistent, and rather than install a ‘No Means No’ chip, Vasi dismantles his creation with an axe, and throws the parts away.
And that’s when Bohra finds Chitti, brings him home, repairs him, and installs a special Red Chip which turns the robot from amoral to actively evil. Then he leaves the now malevolent, brilliant, and lovesick robot alone in the basement with his own half-completed army of killer robots. This doesn’t work out well for anybody.
Whenever a movie draws this much inspiration from Frankenstein you can expect heavy-handed subtext about tampering in God’s domain, and the epilogue, set twenty years in the future, certainly implies that everything that went wrong is a natural result of daring to create a machine that can think for itself. I have to say, though, that I’ve never seen anyone tamper in God’s domain quite so incompetently. Vasi creates a robot without any limits on its behavior other than direct orders, and when that proves to be a mistake he adds emotions, giving his creation motivation but still no control. Nobody in this movie has much sense, but Vasi is the dumbest smart guy I’ve seen onscreen in a long time.
However, this is a killer robot movie, not a primer on using science responsibly. And as a killer robot movie, it’s a great success; the fight choreography (by Yuen Woo Ping, the Farah Khan of violence) is dynamic and blissfully implausible, the musical numbers are colorful and frequent, Aishwarya is suitably pretty, and the special effects are quite advanced for an Indian movie, and certainly imaginative. This is a movie with a giant snake made of robots, and that counts for a lot.
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