“Tamara krutagntha, Mr. Roboto” OR “A Loaded Peacemaker”

In the parts of New York where people spend a small fortune trying to look like they live in poverty, someone is dropping forty dollars to see this new foreign film that no one has heard of yet.
In the parts of Kopal where people dress like they live in poverty because a lot of them actually do, people pay a day’s wages to see the new movie that is all anyone in the country is talking about.
Everyone is going to see “Robot.”
It’s a movie filmed in south India, Machu Picchu, and what I have to assume was the Gobi Desert. It had a budget the size of most country’s gross domestic products, and its lead actor was paid more than the IRS in El Dorado.
This is only fair, I suppose, since he played almost three hundred million roles in this one film. He plays a twenty-something scientist determined to design the perfect fighting robot for the military, which for some reason, is designed to look exactly like him. After the robot develops feelings (naturally) and falls in love with the scientist’s girlfriend (Color me surprised), he is dismantled. The scientist’s evil rival who used to be his teacher (Don’t worry, it’s not the plot that makes this movie, folks) finds the robot in the trash (Because that’s how we all dispose of our high-grade military weaponry with advanced A.I.) he rebuilds him and makes him evil. The robot then proceeds to make copies of himself to take over India. So now we have the leading man, fighting himself, with the aid of an ever increasing number of himselves. Oh, and by the way, the lead actor is sixty years old.
We all flocked to the theater to see this over-the-top-in-every-respect movie, Indians from different social classes and casts, Hindus, Muslims, probably at least one Buddhist, and a row of white, Midwest, mostly Lutherans.
When the whole theater burst into laughter at Telgu jokes, we didn’t get it. When the heroin told the smitten robot that he was her “best friend,” every American boy grunted like they had been punched in the stomach. But despite the miss communications and cultural barriers, when the robot grabbed thirty M-16s, fired them all at once, with a Schwarzenegger-esque “Happy Dawli, folks!” the whole audience went nuts.
It’s a strange thing, and perhaps a little perverse to admit, but as I sat in the back of the dark hot movie theater watching people relax back into their seats as the gun smoke cleared, I could have sworn I just saw violence bringing cultures together.