Alia Bhatt shouting Shiva every four minutes during the first act of Brahmastra starts wearing on your nerves long before the mystical fire even makes an appearance. You want to hand her a glass of water, or at least a script supervisor who might suggest a synonym. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, rattling around in the skull while Ayan Mukerji tries to convince an audience that ancient weapon fragments are hidden inside a modern DJ's leather jacket. Hindi films have chased superhero mythologies for decades without quite figuring out how to ground them in anything resembling human behavior, and this one leans so hard into CGI sparks that you can almost smell the burned processors in the editing room. Ranbir Kapoor wanders through the opening sequences with the vacant, slightly perplexed expression of a man who accidentally walked onto the wrong soundstage and decided to just stay for the catering, which happens to be the exact tone needed for a guy who discovers he can control flames with his palms without burning his designer denim.

The direction is a chaotic mess of ambitious set pieces that sometimes land with genuine visual heft and other times look like a screensaver designed by an exhausted intern working on three hours of sleep. Mukerji spent years putting this beast together, and that sheer exhaustion shows up in the frames. Action beats are chopped into tiny little fragments so fast you cannot tell if a punch landed or if a CGI rock simply exploded near someone's ear, a trick borrowed straight from the worst Hollywood franchises that never works here either. Yet there are moments when the camera slows down, hovering over Amitabh Bachchan as he trains a new generation of warriors in a misty ashram, and for a terrifying brief second you think you are watching something special. Then the plot kicks in again with some nonsense about dark forces and fragmented talismans, and you are back to watching people shout spell names at glowing blue orbs while the sound design tries to rattle loose fillings out of your jaw.

Ranbir and Alia have plenty of chemistry in real life, but onscreen they mostly look like two people who met at a very expensive retreat and forgot why they were supposed to be running from shadowy assassins. He does his signature wide-eyed wonder routine, staring at things with his mouth slightly open, while she plays the designated emotional anchor whose entire purpose is to tell him he is special whenever the plot gets stuck. Nagarjuna shows up for a brief, somewhat dignified cameo that makes you wish he had an entire movie to himself instead of being relegated to sword fodder, and Mouni Roy plays the primary villain with a black-eyed intensity that mostly involves hissing at people while floating three inches off the floor. It is not great, not bad, just there, functioning as a delivery system for exposition dumps about light and darkness that sound like they were translated from an ancient text using a broken app.

The cinematography swings wildly between washed-out digital gray and neon saturation that looks like a music video for an energy drink, sometimes within the exact same scene. Pritam's soundtrack arrives in massive waves, drowning out dialogue with orchestral choirs that try to force an emotional reaction where none exists, though Kesariya manages to stick in your head long after the screen goes dark despite the slightly distracting lyric change that happened halfway through production. When the songs hit, the movie stops dead, but honestly, those musical breaks are often more engaging than the lumbering exposition scenes where characters explain the mythology of the Astraverse using glowing holograms that float in mid-air. You miss the grit of older Hindi movies where people just punched each other in dirty alleyways without needing a cosmic reason connected to the alignment of the planets and a secret society of ascetic guardians.

Beneath the glowing graphics and the endless talk of balance, the film is essentially an excuse to build a cinematic universe that will undoubtedly spawn a dozen sequels regardless of whether this initial chapter actually works on its own terms. That corporate desperation seeps into every frame, turning what could have been a messy, passionate swing at fantasy into a glorified pitch meeting disguised as a blockbuster. Kapoor tries his best to sell the emotional stakes of a guy who just wants to belong somewhere, but the script keeps interrupting him with more lore about weapons made of pure energy. By the time the final confrontation rolls around with its dizzying loops of digital fire, you stop caring who holds the pieces of the broken weapon and start wondering if anyone involved in the production ever read a comic book that didn't involve a glowing CGI sky beam. It is an exhausting exercise in brand expansion that leaves you cold, stranded in a theater waiting for something real to happen behind the digital noise.