Professor Shanku O El Dorado (2019) is billed as "India's First Science Fiction." It's obviously not India's first science fiction film; I know that there are earlier ones because I've reviewed a bunch of them. However, the movie is based on the "Professor Shanku" stories written by Bengali author Satyajit Ray. The first Shanku story appeared in 1961, narrowly beating Rocket Tarzan, but there's a long tradition of Bengali science fiction going back to at least the 1890s.
The movie opens with a framing story in which a magazine writer (Subhrajit Dutta) is given one of Professor Shanku's diaries. This comes directly from the first Shanku story, but it has absolutely no impact on the plot of the film and is never mentioned again. The real story starts with Shanku (Dhritiman Chatterjee) sitting at home reading the article that he wrote for Cosmos about one of his many inventions. He's interrupted by Nakur Biswas (Subhasish Mukhopadhya), a humble villager who gained psychic powers after a close encounter with ball lightning. Biswas warns Shanku about traveling to Brazil, then returns home.
Soon after, Shanku chats with his old friends (and sidekicks) Jeremy Saunders (Ricardo Dantas) and Wilhelm Krol (Roney Facchini), who tell him that he's been invited to present at a symposium and receive an honorary degree at an institute in Sao Paolo. Shanku decides to attend, and to take Biswas with him as his secretary.
In Brazil, Shanku exhibits his inventions, including a pill that can cure any disease, and the Annihilin, an honest to goodness death ray. Creepy American Solomon Bloomgarten (Fernando Coelho) is particularly impressed and offers to buy all the patents for the princely sum of ONE MILLION DOLLARS!, but Shonku refuses to sell, calmly explaining that his inventions can't be mass produced, they have to be hand-crafted. (That's your objection, Shanku? Not the fact that the obviously evil guy wants to buy your death ray?)
Bloomgarten is also intrigued when Biswas mentions the lost city of El Dorado, and even more so when Biswas carelessly reveals that he has psychic powers and can actually find the lost city. In short order, the research for Shanku's inventions is surreptitiously stolen, and Biswas joins Bloomgarten on an expedition to El Dorado, so Shanku . . . sets off for his scheduled tour of the Amazon rain forest.
It sounds like a recipe for fast-paced, two fisted pulp adventure, but instead what we get is relaxed, meandering pulp adventure; there's an entire montage devoted to Biswas getting a passport and buying new clothes for the trip. What it actually reminds me of is early Doctor Who storylines in which our heroes arrive at an unfamiliar location, split up and wander around for a while, tell each other interesting facts, and then the villain is undone by his own hubris. I happen to like early Doctor Who, so that's a bonus, but it's not for everyone.
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