Pluto Review | A Scattered Sci-Fi Comedy That Takes Way Too Long to Get Going

Adithyan Chandrashekhar’s new movie after Enkilum Chandrike, Pluto, is a chaos comedy that has this sci-fi backdrop of an alien coming to Earth. While the early bits of the movie make us think it is a sci-fi movie, as the film progresses, it gets into that comedic space, and that sort of helps the movie end on a relatively funnier note. Pluto is a movie that couldn’t fully utilize its potential to be a madcap satiric comedy because of the jitters in the story’s initial portions. I am someone who has enjoyed movies like Tharangam, Mariyam Vannu Vilakkoothi, Padayottam, etc. for the eccentric comedy they tried. Pluto had the scope to be in that niche, but the lack of clarity reduces the movie’s overall comedic impact on us.

So Vicky, aka Vignesh, is this typical jobless young guy who has a lot of backlogs in his engineering career. His father hates him, his brother is more successful than him, and everything Vicky has tried has ended up as a failure. So, into this depressing life of Vicky enters an alien, and what we see here are the events that unfold in Vicky’s life after that.

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There is a lack of clarity in what this movie wants to be, and that is perhaps the major issue. The beginning parts of the movie are dedicated to establishing the characters. From showing the hero, the hero’s friends, family, girlfriend, and the bad guys in the movie, the film is somewhat all over the place in that first half. Even at the interval point, you really don’t get a sense of excitement. When it comes to the second half of the film, maybe because of the underwhelming turn of events till that point, the placement of the quirky humor, like the hero’s mother talking about packing something for the alien for his return journey, really feels funny. The kind of humor one gets to experience in that last quarter of the movie should have been there throughout.

I watched it in the theater, and when you are watching a movie from a theater, you don’t have the pause or fast-forward option, and you just sit through it. If I were watching this movie as a casual watch on any OTT platform on a Sunday afternoon, the chances of me stopping the movie after 10 or 20 minutes are very high because the number of typical jokes around your stereotypical failed son/engineer is too much and too familiar. Even when the movie gets going in the second half with the hunt for the alien happening, there are these unnecessary songs and stuff that expose the creative vacuum. Eccentric comedy is a very difficult genre to crack, as you have to transport the audience to that zone of nonsensical humor. Adithyan Chandrasekhar’s movie manages to do that only in the last quarter of its runtime. The cinematography by Vishnu Sarma, with that red and green visual style, is able to give the movie a comic-book-style, quirky and vibrant visual aesthetic.

After a really long time, Pluto is the movie that has Neeraj Madhav in a lead role. The actor is known for his natural way of performing humor, and the movie uses those acting chops to convey the heightened comedy it intends to show. Althaf Salim plays the titular character Pluto in this film, and he was able to do the eccentric stuff in his typical style. Aju Varghese as Tiger Thampi somewhat becomes a tribute to Balarama, with him playing this character named Tiger Thampi who looks like Jumpan and also appears in the Shikari Shambhu costume. Arsha Chandini Baiju is the female lead, and she was fine in that not-so-challenging role. Content creators Subin Tarzon and Nihal were added to the cast mostly to repeat the kind of performance they have showcased in their reels. Saheer Muhammed got to do a role that was different from the kind of serious stuff he was doing. 4.5 Gang fame Sachin Joseph was able to make some scenes really witty with his angry outbursts.

Structurally, I would say Pluto is almost like a comical equivalent of the recently released Dridam. There were a lot of elements in Dridam’s writing, like the clunky dialogues and overtly evident, polite behaviour of characters, that sort of irritates the audience before entering the showdown. In a somewhat similar manner, almost 70% of Pluto shows these efforts to be a colorful entertainer with eccentric jokes, songs, chaos, etc. And just when you have pretty much lost interest in the movie, Adithyan Chandrasekhar and team start to crack the kind of humor that was essential for the movie. The quirky and loud humor that unfolds during the climax chaos, along with that tail-end scene, made me wish that the larger part of the film had that kind of wit.