After Dhallywood superstar Shakib Khan’s entertaining West Bengal hit, “Chalbaaz,” I was eager to see his upcoming action film “Super Hero.” Since the release of its action packed teaser, on May 1, I was hopeful that the film director, Ashiqur Rahman’s, latest offering would hit the theatre with a bang—but I was proven wrong.
I bought tickets for the film’s 3pm show at Sony Cinema Hall, in Mirpur, on Tuesday. Judging by recent reports on the film and the full house, I thought I was in for a show—but it pained me from the opening sequence.
Co-written by Delwar Hossain Dil and Ashiqur Rahman, the film’s storyline is a textbook Hollywood cliche where our superhero, Shakib, is one of the finest special agents of Bangladesh’s special operations forces. He is sent to Australia for an international class in combat training; during his training period, the Bangladesh High Commission in Australia assigns him to the security team of a Bangladeshi professor (played by Tariq Anam Khan). The professor is a missile expert and comes to Sydney with his paralysed wife and a laptop full of classified missile technology.
Though the plot of the film, shot in Australia and Bangladesh, follows a formulaic commercial Hollywood film, it is fairly well developed and has some major surprises packed into it—some of which I did not see coming.
“Super Hero,” featuring the Shakib and Bubly duo in the lead roles, was, overall, an entertaining action film; and it managed to hold my attention during its two and a half-hour-long run time. This, of course, is rare as many commercial Bangladeshi films are so badly written that they make the audience leave the theatre within the first hour.
My complaints about the high-budget film lie in its technical issues. From the very first sequence, what hit me was the poor quality of its dubbing. The audio lagged about half a second after the footage—resulting in creepy, out-of- sync dialogue. It is 2018 and Bangladeshi films are still using dated Automated Dialogue Replacement (commonly known as ADR) processes for its dialogue. In the rest of the world, this process only used to fix errors during production.
Ever wondered why the dialogue in commercial Bangla films always sounds a bit unnatural? The reason behind this is that Bangladeshi films still follow an obsolete ADR process —where they dub all the dialogue during post-production. There is nothing wrong with this method theoretically, but when the audio is not mixed properly, the lip sync is unsynchronised and creates an unnatural aura throughout the film which is very hard to adapt to. It has been decades since the introduction of live, on set, production sound systems— Hollywood, and even some Bollywood films use it.. So, why is the Bangladeshi film industry lagging and still producing these odd-sounding big-budget films? In this case, unnatural out-of-sync audio continued throughout the film—which was very uncomfortable for me.
Another major technical issue was the film’s visual effects (VFX) work. The film had some great action sequences with high quality animation, but; it also had some very poor green screen composites—displaying different scenes in the background). I am guessing the film’s crew did not manage to get all the shots they wanted during production in Australia so they decided to return to Bangladesh and put Australian landscapes in the background of the shots they did not get.
With poor VFX work in its post-production workflow, the whole film became a laughing stock to the general audience. Some shots were actually shot in Sydney, Australia, then, suddenly Shakib and Bubly appear in a shot with a static, abnormal-looking landscape behind them. The background looks like Australia but was put there in post-production. The real and fake Australia visuals switch during the entire Australian sequence of the film. The worst part is that it is done so poorly that members of the general audience could see that and at one point they were just laughing about it.
I am not saying that other films do not cheat and they do not put foreign locations’ backgrounds in their shots. This is commonplace, but others do a better job of it. Bangladesh is getting better at making films each day. Newcomer filmmakers of this country, who are entertaining us with these new and improved storytelling, need to learn and know their limitations. If one does not have Hollywood-grade visual effects artists, who will make the VFX look real, then one should avoid including them.
After world-class special effects done in Bangladeshi films like “Dhaka Attack” and “Bizli,” Bangladeshi audiences will no-longer allow poor mistakes like these. If one has the budget, team, and time to pull it off well, only then should one produce and direct a VFX-based big budget feature film like this.
Technical issues aside, as an ordinary film-goer I enjoyed Ashiqur Rahman’s “Super Hero” and am looking forward to seeing more precise and quality films from him in the future.
Siam Raihan is a film editor and a sub-editor at the Dhaka Tribune’s Showtime Desk
