Aamir Khan’s alien adventure PK set for a Japanese release

Rajkumar Hirani’s Aamir Khan-starrer PK will open in cinema screens across Japan this autumn. A deal between UTV Motion Pictures and Japan’s Nikkatsu, one of the largest movies houses in the island nation, has made this release possible.

Nikkatsu is also trying to get the PK actors -- Khan, Anushka Sharma, Sanjay Dutt, Sushant Singh Rajput and Boman Irani -- to visit Japan for a pre-opening publicity campaign.

Read: PK review

PK was reportedly the first ever Indian film to gross Rs 348 crore worldwide, and it was a surprise hit in China grossing $ 18 million. Many young Chinese went ga-ga over the movie and this writer remembers his college going interpretors during his jury assignment at the Silk Road International Film Festival in Fuzhou last year being besotted by Khan and Sharma, and the movie itself.

Read: PK to Sarfarosh, Aamir Khan’s 5 films with a cause and message

The Vice-President of Nikkatsu’s International Department said: “We love the film and highly appreciate its quality. We also recognise that this same combination will surely accelerate the Indian movies movement again here in Japan.”

Sushant Singh Rajput and Anushka Sharma also played pivotal roles in the film.

(Once in the 1990s, Rajinikanth’s films were a huge hit in Japan, but for some reason the craze died down.)

Japan is a highly gadget-crazy country, where men, women and children are forever trying out newer electronics products and are invariably addicted to computer games of the most mind-boggling variety. In such a scenario, PK with its fascinating plot of an alien in the form of a handsome human being (Khan) -- which made him adorable to the masses, as opposed to the Steven Spielberg variety of hideous looking extra-terrestrial -- is bound to seduce the Japanese.

Watch Aamir Khan in a song from PK

Admittedly, for an Indian, PK went beyond science fiction. It was really, beneath the veneer of an innocent alien’s adventures in a bewildering land -- a devastating critique of superstition and the evils of so-called godmen and there wily ways of fooling gullible people.

Read: Aamir Khan’s PK is the first Bollywood film to earn Rs 100cr in China

In PK, Khan’s alien says: “God that created us all is the only one people should believe in, and that the other ‘duplicate Gods (read godmen)’ are created by man”.

PK was thus an extraordinarily powerful indictment of all that is happening in today’s India.

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