5 in Share Share on Tumblr Click to play video New Delhi: Ra.One is certainly not the favourite of the critics, but Shah Rukh K

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Actor Shahrukh Khan at a promotional event for his latest release ‘Ra.One.’

Living in the American prairie, several hours drive from a major metropolitan area, means that catching Bollywood on the big screen is a special occasion.

It’s so entertaining and enlightening to see an Indian film in the cinema with an audience that I tend to drop everything when a new release is announced, no matter what the movie is.

As summer ticked by with no sign of films like “Delhi Belly,” “Singham,” “Bodyguard” and “Mere Brother Ki Dulhan,” I began to lose hope that I’d get to see “Ra.One.” It was a real thrill, then, to see an email from our local distributor with the subject line “‘Ra.One’ Grand Release on Diwali.” I always get goosebumps when a distributor announces a movie I actually want to see, especially when that movie is one of the year’s most anticipated releases.

A local showing means I’ll understand what everyone is talking about and get to participate in the global conversation about the film before all the excitement fades away.

In most cases, my Bollywood cinema-going experiences in the U.S. are a bit tamer than the descriptions I have heard of movie theater experiences in different parts of India. In my local cinema, an art house in Champaign, Illinois, the predominantly South Asian-origin audience seems to operate in an ever-shifting cultural mix of filmi exuberance and Midwestern American public reserve: it’s perfectly acceptable to discuss the film at full voice as it plays, but only once have I seen anyone leap out of their seat to dance during a song. Big laughs often obscure the next few lines of dialogue, but cheers and howls of appreciation generally erupt only for the biggest stars portrayed in the most spectacular ways.

Audience reactions can say so much about whether a film’s content and techniques are working. Emotions and humor can be lost or mangled in translation even with the most carefully created subtitles, but they are reflected and restored in the responses of the people around me. This phenomenon happens in reverse, too: The filmmakers may have put all they had into a joke or romantic scene, but the snorts and cackles of my neighbors tell me when the efforts fall flat. No words are necessary to perceive the difference between “laughing with” and “laughing at.”

The most excitable audiences I’ve been a part of were for films that fall under the “mass entertainer” category. At the Tamil blockbuster “Endhiran” (2010), the audience screamed so loudly during superstar Rajnikanth’s credit in the titles that the film was inaudible for half a minute. At a screening of the Telugu film “Dookudu” in September, I was delighted to spot a group of young men in the front rows flinging handfuls of self-made confetti into the air at the first few appearances of hero Mahesh Babu (a ritual that friends in Australia tell me accompanies many Telugu heroes in their theaters). During the item song “Character Dheela” in Salman Khan-starrer “Ready” (2011), the wolf-whistles for Zarine Khan almost drowned out the music and were 10 times more passionate than anything uttered for the film’s actual heroine, Asin.

My Friday night show of “Ra.One” in east-central Illinois got off to a happy start. The lobby of the small theater, the usual venue for Indian films in town, was jammed with chattering couples, friends and families. Once the film was underway, however, it seemed from my vantage point near the back of the full house that the audience was not demonstrably impressed. In fact, the loudest, most excited reaction was for someone who wasn’t even a part of the film – it was the cameo appearance of Rajnikanth as his robot character from “Endhiran.”

One could argue that this reaction parallels the film itself: Kareena Kapoor’s character seemed more awed by Rajni-bot than she did by the hero of the story she was in. The star of this film elicited a few whistles at the first appearance of superheroic G.One (Shahrukh Khan), who bursts into the scene to save the primary target of villain Ra.One’s wrath. But the audience had a lot more fun earlier in the film when the first version of SRK appeared, a deliberately ridiculous silken-haired hero in black leather who alternates dishoom-dishoom and canoodling with the damsel in distress while nodding to the actor’s own previous films.

Across its two-and-a-half-hour run time, the responses to “Ra.One” were much smaller, much milder than hoped. If people were impressed by the technology and effects, as I was, they kept that praise to themselves. Our collective reaction was fairly stoic, which is not a description I anticipated would apply in this setting. There were no screams or cheers, no applause or dancing or even boisterous wisecracks to the characters on the screen. What I learned from this audience—admittedly a very particular demographic slice of the film’s global audience—is that “Ra.One” simply failed to excite.

What was the reaction to “Ra.One” in your cinema hall? Please share your thoughts and descriptions in the Comments section