Whoa ! Is that man with the disheveled hair and over-all Pagal-e-Azam demeanor Emperor Hemu, the overlord of Delhi? Is that scuffle between underpaid extras, fought with the intensity of a ludo game at an old age home, a recreation of the historic battle of Panipat? Is that Amitabh Bachchan hiding amidst the shadows during the Akbar-Jodhaa love-making scene saying “Aiii, kahaan haath lagata hain” as Hrithik and bahu-rani Aishwarya make agonizing faces of passion all the while kissing foreheads and avoiding passionate tongue-action, which as we all know raised the heckles of the B-family previously? On a related note, why does Hrithik never offer a lift to Aishwarya in his helicopter?

Doesn’t Aishwarya Rai look like Zhang Ziyi in her white ninja get-up? Was the climactic one-on-one battle inspired from “Troy”? When an angry Jodhaa drops a purdah in front of Akbar, why does he not sing “Purdah nashin ko be-purdaah na kar doon to, Akbar mera naam nahin hain” ? How long does it take for a man shot full of arrows to die? Did Akbar invest so much time in wooing each of the hundreds of “companions” (spoils of war) that lived in his harem? If he did, no wonder he never got around to learning to read or write. And finally will the great emperor actually turn to Jodhaa, Dhoom II style, and say “Are you like checking me out” when he spies her ogling his bare torso as he does his morning sword calisthenics?

These and other ponderous questions (including “when was the last time I checked my car’s tire pressure” and “was the front door locked when we left”) occupied my mind as I labored through the three odd hours of “Jodhaa Akbar”, a fictional love-story overlaid on actual historic events, that is neither a compelling re-telling of the past nor a soaring romance. The best I can call it is an average, overdrawn period-piece which has its flashes of excellence, that are alas way too few and far in between.

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A hot summer day. A party is underway, in an upscale Manhattan apartment. Beautiful people abound. A friend of the host, slightly worse for the booze, has been assigned to record the party on a digital handicam. Inane shout-outs into the camera, scraps of conversation are recorded on tape. And then suddenly, without any of the ominous background score and the other standard portends of cinematic doom that announce their arrival, death and devastation intrudes on the merry gathering, in a way eerily reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of Red Death” .

“Cloverfield” , reportedly “inspired” by the South Korean movie “Host” (which I have not seen) is the latest in a long line of apocalyptic monster/alien/virus themed movies that Hollywood churns out with monotonic regularity, almost identical in their depiction of epic carnage, gore, ugly monsters and superhuman heroism. Except that here, there are no sweeping camera angles, no explicit story arc, no backstory or solution, and no superstud who saves the day. Instead what we have is a 84 minute, single-person-wielding-a-handicam perspective of a few hours of urban terror, where shaky shots of collapsing buildings pack as much horror as that of a character, hiding in a deserted metro station, breaking the news of his brother’s death over the cellphone to their mother.

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