Kirubhakar Purushothaman

Superhero films have become synonymous with worldbuilding, and any film in the genre that does less — fewer interwoven narratives, callbacks, and inside jokes — tends to feel odd (this is more a critique of the trend than the films themselves). Maybe that’s why James Gunn’s reimagined DC Universe continues its existential struggle, because Superman (2025) and the latest release, Supergirl (2026), are less about being pieces of a larger puzzle. That means these films don’t have an easy way out and have to be self-sufficient. That’s both the boon and bane of director Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl — it is indeed a story- and character-driven movie, but it lacks the punch and fails to be the event superhero films have habituated us to till now.

The trope of the retired badass, or, to put it locally, the Baasha template, never grows dated because it is one of the most relatable tropes in cinema. Wait, hear me out. You could be anyone: a teacher, an autowala, a clerk, or a naive watchman; suddenly these films enable you to imagine a badass past life for yourself. After all, everyone is the protagonist of their own story in their head. That’s the allure. A sleeping giant finally rises from slumber to save the day, bringing a sort of catharsis for the viewer, who can imagine their own version of a bloody past.

Baahubali, KGF and Salaar’s success has set a trend: films increasingly become hype instruments for their heroes. The template is now painfully familiar: a stranger arrives in town, bewildered by the hero’s omnipresent worship. He then meets another archetype: the hypeman, clearly of the land, dispenses worldly wisdom like a street philosopher. The stranger, suitably elitist and condescending, serves as the audience surrogate. The hype rural man becomes the narrator. In Peddi, Boman Irani gets the thankless honour of the uber-cool stranger, dragged through a dense forest by the hypeman just to hear the legend of Peddi (Ram Charan).

Over the years, Tamil cinema has trained the mass audience to always root for the loser. For example, Maan Karate’s protagonist, Peter (Sivakarthikeyan), is the poster boy for this brand of hero. In essence, Peter has no redeeming qualities. He is a lazy and incompetent bloke who lives off a gang that has a premonition that he will win a boxing contest. For a villain, the film features a character who has toiled his entire life to become a professional boxer. Yet, the film encourages the audience to back the hero because he is supposed to be relatable to the masses. Isn’t it easy to imagine a person winning in life without any effort?

What makes Vignesh Shivan an interesting filmmaker is his relentless pursuit of packaging what an irreverent Gen Z would call boomerish as an ultra-modern ‘sheesh’… something even an unaware Gen Beta would lap up as a perfectly in-vogue emotion. Poda Podi is about a modern dancer whose husband eventually convinces her that family rearing matters more than her dream of winning dance competitions. Naanum Rowdy Dhaan was a cool story of a pure-hearted gentleman, now called out for being a stalker. Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal is about a polyamorous hero whose love for both heroines is so pure he doesn’t consummate the relationship with either. With Love Insurance Kompany, Vignesh Shivan has taken this righteous hero into a future where love has been utterly commodified — and it is up to him to teach his lover, and the world, what true love is.

What if you have no one to die for but are put on a mission to save everyone… and in a sense, everything in the universe? Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) of Project Hail Mary finds himself in such a predicament. Actually, he doesn’t even know he is. When he wakes up from an induced coma, Grace finds himself in a spaceship light years away from home. With his crew dead and his memory inching back to him due to the retrograde amnesia, Grace has to figure out why he is in the middle of space floating in a ship headed to Tau Ceti, a relatively nearby star to the Solar system–just 12 light years away (Didn’t I say relative) from home. Grace slowly remembers himself as a school teacher, a nerd, a loner, and a norm-defying molecular biologist, but what he doesn’t seem to understand or believe is why he would sign up for this one-way trip to save the world when he doesn’t even have one soul to care about.