Release date 12 January 2024

Running time 155 minutes

 In Indru Netru Naalai, director Ravikumar gave a local flavor to the high concept of time travel. In Ayalaan, too, he does the same... taking a sci-fi premise about aliens on Earth and presenting it as a distinctly Tamil movie. We get the Tamil cinema must-haves - hero introduction song, romance, a couple of comedians as the hero's sidekicks, a corporate villain, played by an actor from the north (here, it's Sharad Kelkar), a pinch of mother sentiment, and even messages about organic farming. The last bit was a staple of big-hero films from 2015-20, the period in which this film was under production, and has gone out of fashion of late, but surprisingly, it doesn't feel dated or forced here, given that the core theme is all about saving the planet.

It is the twists that Ravikumar gives to concepts that we have seen in several Hollywood films - superpowers, UFOs, extra-terrestrials, powerful robots, femme fatales, and large-scale destruction - that make Ayalaan an entertainer for all ages. In the first half, he uses the alien, called Tattoo, like a cute cartoon character, generating wonder and humor, thereby appealing to kids and the kids within adults. The fact that the visual effects are largely seamless only adds to the magic - the filmmaking complements the imagination we see in the writing, which niftily keeps bringing back characters and elements we were introduced to in the first half in effective ways in the second to further the narrative