Ramayana movie review lands on Ramayana: Rise of a Legend as a three-hour blockbuster that opens as India’s most expensive film ever. Nitesh Tiwari has not just mounted a big film; he has split the story in two, so this release is only the first half.
Ranbir Kapoor plays Rama, and Sai Pallavi plays Sita, giving the project a clear center inside a production that aims far beyond routine spectacle. For viewers, that means the film is not being sold as a self-contained episode but as the opening movement of a larger adaptation.
Rama, Sita, and Nitesh Tiwari
Nitesh Tiwari directs from source material that comes from the ancient classical poem about Rama, the avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. That foundation helps explain why the film is being treated less like a standard release and more like an event built around scale, mythology, and continuity.
Hans Zimmer and AR Rahman provide the music, which matches the production’s ambition even before the story reaches Lanka or Ayodhya. The comparison set around the film points to Lord of the Rings and The Lion King, but the more practical point is simpler: the movie is designed to carry the burden of a very large canvas without compressing the material into a single sitting.
Three hours, one half
The three-hour runtime changes how the film has to work. It has enough space to establish Rama, Sita, and the family conflict around King Dasharatha, Kaikeyi, and Bharata, but the structure also means the payoff is deferred rather than completed.
That split matters because the story’s built-in conflict turns on a reversal: Rama is banished to the forest after Kaikeyi reminds Dasharatha of a promise to Bharata, even though Dasharatha had been preparing to cede the throne to Rama. Lara Dutta, Adinath Kothare, Ravi Dubey, Naveen “Yash” Kumar, Vivek Oberoi, and Rakul Preet Singh fill out the world around that rupture, but the film’s first release still has to carry the weight of a story that is openly unfinished.
5 November in UK and US
Ramayana: Rise of a Legend is due out on 5 November in Australia, the UK and US. That timing gives audiences outside the initial release window a chance to see the scale for themselves, but it also leaves the second half as the real business question hanging over the project.
For now, the smartest read is that this is a launch, not a conclusion. The film’s size, runtime, and two-part design suggest a production trying to build anticipation through incompletion, and that only works if the next chapter arrives with the same discipline as the first.
