'Moonwalk' Movie Review: A VHS-Era Dance Movie With The Meanest Of Moves

Director: Vinod A. K.
Writers: Vinod A. K., Mathew Varghese, Sunil Gopalakrishnan
Cast: Anunath, Rishi Kainikkara, Siddharth B., Sujith Prabhakar, Arjun Manilal
Language: Malayalam 

In an early sequence in Moonwalk, we see a group of seven friends assembling in front of a vintage Sony Trinitron television with a video tape of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The year is 1987, long before smart phones and YouTube, and this means that watching a glimpse of MJ has taken weeks of planning. Each one of them have their own theories on getting the video cassette player to work; finally when they manage to get it playing, all we see are waves of static, with unrecognisable bits of Thriller on screen.

For a small budget Malayalam film releasing today, it’s not tough to imagine how impossibly out-of-reach it must have been to afford even a tiny 10-second clip of the iconic song. Yet even without showing us a single shot of MJ or his songs, the film manages to find its way to invoke his spirit. It’s a film set right at the peak of the break dance era and there couldn’t have been a more fitting way to begin the tribute. Yet the real beauty of Vinod AK’s film is how he’s able to hold on to this feeling until we arrive at a very satisfying payoff, much much later.

Like Alapuzha Gymkhana from earlier this year, Moonwalk too is about a bunch of boys who are yet to fully become men. They are all in their early years of college and most of their problems are those you’d imagine everyone has gone through at their age. And like Alapuzha Gymkhana, this too is a movie that has been created to push you deep into a vibe, more than the perfection you’d expect from a neatly written screenplay.

In a sense, it’s also a film that effortlessly breaks the expected conventions of a dance movie. Speaking broadly, Moonwalk is a film that revolves around a dance competition, but instead of this becoming the sole focus, the film uses it simply as a springboard to give us the stories of a bunch of loveable characters and the peculiar period in their lives when dance takes over everything else.

It’s a fascinating idea that finds clever ways of redefining the sub-genre. So, if you’re expecting a regular love-at-first-first-sight scene for one of these characters, chances are you might feel disappointed. What we get instead is a love-at-first-sight mega sequence in which the whole group of boys falls for break dance as an art form in one epic moment. It’s again a scene you can only imagine to be set in the '80s, back when discovering a new dance form could happen in real life, without it happening virtually. When the boys simultaneously watch a gang performing moves like the corkscrew, the helicopter, and the windmill for the first time, we feel like we’ve been pushed into a time capsule too.

Moonwalk also doesn’t simply fast forward through all the effort that goes into the boys becoming good dancers. Instead of one convenient montage that simply converts all of them into experts, we feel each of them improving gradually as the film progresses. So, when they finally get their big moment on stage, the various stages of learning have happened so organically that we feel their performance in our gut.

Right from the costume department, music, the art direction to the choreography, everything in the film works in tandem to create this effect. So much so that the gang’s mullet isn’t just an added extra to evoke the '80s, but it’s as good as a complete sub-plot with a solid middle and an ending. There are also several cleverly-written arcs, including a rival who appears to be straight out of a B-grade '80s action movie; but when we realise what Moonwalk is trying to do with that villain archetype, we feel like this film can never be taken for granted.

Which is why we seldom feel any dullness, even when it settles into spaces that can be termed predictable. By this point in the second half, we’ve as good as become a member of their gang, creating working bonds with most of them. Their defeats begin to feel like personal losses and their wins, like triumphs. It might not be perfect; in fact, it’s far from it. But Moonwalk is a film that simply brims with life in the way that you’ve been transported straight into someone’s dearest memories. It’s the best kind of nostalgia, made with so much love that you can’t help but get with the beat.