Even the world-building feels repetitive. The plot precedes the events of the movies – back when Queen Sivagami was still playing mind-games with young princes Amarendra Baahubali and Bhallaladeva – but the cycle of power, jealousy, deceit, mythological hangovers and battles remains the same. Baahubali is the people’s prince who treats his cousin’s sabotage attempts as sibling banter; Bhallaladeva is a war-mongering dictator desperate to be King; Kattappa is a loyal-to-a-fault commander with a penchant for twists; their new nemesis is called Rakta Deva, a masked Marvel-villain-styled baddie with some beef to grind. The storyline is a not-so-distant relative of Santosh Sivan’s Asoka (2001). When things on the battlefield go wrong early on, Baahubali is presumed dead because he was last seen standing on a tank drowned by flaming lava (don’t ask). His protector, Kattappa, is held responsible for this tragedy by Queen Sivagami. He is banished, and like any self-respecting exiled warrior in a period epic, old Kattappa finds the time to hit the bottle and save a woman’s dignity at a local watering hole. Naturally, a resentful Kattappa breaks bad and is lured to lead the wolf-themed army of Rakta Deva, whose real identity is a mystery. And you’re a fool if you think Baahubali died – he is held for six months in a random slave camp, where he again becomes a people’s hero, counsels brainwashed children of this enemy kingdom, and returns to warn his mother of an impending attack.
What follows is the pale shadow of a spectacle that spends more time staging verbose dialogue than grand battles. The few interesting strands – like an eccentric inventor whose weapon falls into the wrong hands; or the kids divided by moral conflict – get lost in a sea of stretched red herrings. Most episodes are just padding, where every character is pretending to be someone they’re not. Even in the context of the overcooked premise, there are two moments that succumb to the inert animation. The first involves a masked Kattappa and Baahubali fighting each other without realizing they’re fighting each other. The scene builds up to a revelation of sorts, except that Kattappa’s shock doesn’t quite register. The idea is that he’s too consumed by bitterness to retain any love for the royal family, but I’m going to blame this lack of impact on the technical prowess of the production.