Director: Zoya Akhtar
Writers: Ayesha DeVitre Dhillon, Reema Kagti, Zoya Akhtar
Cast: Agastya Nanda, Suhana Khan, Khushi Kapoor, Vedang Raina, Mihir Ahuja, Aditi Saigal, Yuvraj Menda, Alyy Khan, Tara Sharma, Luke Kenny, Koel Purie
Duration: 143 mins
Streaming on: Netflix
At first glance, The Archies unfolds like a safe and superficial take on its famous source material. Stiff nostalgia and cosplay vibes seep through every frame. Based on the characters of Archie Comics, Zoya Akhtar’s film retains the low-stakes utopianism of the illustrated pages. There is a story that pits capitalism and modernization against literal and figurative roots, but there are no actual villains. The goodness of everyone is inevitable – be it the millionaire behind the move or the shifty council members. The teen spats, too, are transient: There is nothing a gift or cake can’t solve. It’s like the moral canon of the Archie universe cannot be disrupted. Veronica’s father, Mr. Lodge, wants to raze the town’s beloved green park to build a luxury hotel, but it’s Mr. Lodge. You know he doesn’t pose a serious threat. You know that these conflicts can’t go too far.
Even the setting feels customized to camouflage the body of a Bollywood launch vehicle. The Riverdale of The Archies is an isolated anglo-Indian hilltown in 1964. The place is steeped in British heritage so that the teething problems of an urban cast are baked into the environment. It’s an updated version of how a London-return background would be written into early Katrina Kaif characters. The film is also a traditional musical, so that emotions can be sung or jived rather than expressed or acted. The debutants – particularly Suhana Khan (as Veronica) and Khushi Kapoor (as Betty) – spring to life in these portions. There are founder’s balls, chic ice cream parlours, and picnics that resemble retro-themed parties. There’s a band that subconsciously apes a Beatles classic, Cinthol soap ads on the radio, Goldspot bottles and Godard quotes. Maybe the adaptation is so physically generic to offset the fact that every love triangle we’ve seen is already a spiritual descendent of the Archie-Betty-Veronica dynamic. (And Kuch Kuch Hota Hai already exists). So this is, in a way, the Ground Zero of personality tropes. If you adapt something long enough, it circles back to its original form.
If you look past the shiny surface, though, The Archies is a self-reflexive critique of its own legacy. It’s shaped by an awareness of its own image. The biggest hit of 2023, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, mined the evolving relationship between society and the eponymous doll. The social consequences of the seemingly harmless toy defined the meta-narrative of the film; it didn’t need a tangible villain, because the villain was within. The Archies isn’t half as creative or witty. But the design strives for something similar, in the way it examines the Archie effect and ‘revises’ the blind spots of the comic book. Akhtar, along with co-writers Reema Kagti and Ayesha DeVitre Dhillon, infuses the story with the sort of modern agency that challenges the space and time it stems from.
The definition of Average Life – and its inextricable link with the outside world – comes into focus. For instance, the diplomatic charm of Archie Andrews (Agastya Nanda) is reframed as a limitation. When he declines to comment on the hotel dispute, his friends break out into a nicely worded number called ‘Everything is Political’. (I found myself thinking of cinephiles who insist that art and politics are separate entities, whatever that means.) It’s another matter that a little song-and-dance swag is all it takes to transform Archie. Yet, it’s a neat reminder that reality is the cornerstone of fantasy. The freckle-faced redhead of the comic panels emerged as a wartime antidote during the early 1940s. The light-skinned one in this film is born in 1947, the year of India’s independence. Free will and democracy is the DNA of his identity. Which is to say: Even Riverdale’s carefree nothingness is a statement against the drama that produced it.
The tweaks are not subtle, but the context allows the film to sidestep the performative wokeness that plagued a show like Made In Heaven 2. The commentary becomes an extension of feel-good characters that have influenced generations of youngsters. Nice Guy Archie’s ‘confusion’ between girl-next-door Betty and siren-next-door Veronica is finally called out for what it is. The comics normalized Archie’s two-timing as a form of cute compassion over the years. He believes that he loves both of them (“I wish I had two hearts''), but the two girls here ultimately refuse to let a boy derail their friendship. They choose each other and themselves over an adolescent situationship. The staging is playful, because it’s tough to sprinkle life lessons across the idealism of a comic-book milieu. The intent, however, is refreshing.
I also like how a food-loving Jughead (Mihir Ahuja) is not presented as girl-agnostic so much as someone who’s intimidated by the opposite gender. He sees in Betty and Veronica the ferocity that Archie refuses to. In one of the film’s funnier scenes, a paranoid Jughead reimagines their cheerleading rehearsals as a roller-skating duet in which they threaten Archie. At another point, Ethel (Aditi Saigal) – who’s all dewy-eyed and desperate for Jughead’s attention in the comics – scolds him for appropriating her ambitions. Reggie Mantle (a standout Vedang Raina) is vain and smooth, but he isn’t the simplistic devil to Archie’s angel. If anything, he’s the most empathetic of them. Besides driving the campaign against Lodge Industries, he is the only one who understands the closeted turmoil of nerdy Dilton Doiley (Yuvraj Menda). It’s as if the film wants us to know that these kids are more than the easy adjectives we associate them with. There’s chemistry between the teenagers who – not unlike Stereotypical Barbie – try to dismantle the plastic dimensions of their being.
The few real-world ingredients help. Like a dash of old-school patriotism: The shadow of post-independence pride hangs over the Andrews family, with Fred (Suhaas Ahuja) hoping that son Archie rethinks his desire to study abroad. Like the issue of free press: Reggie’s father (Luke Kenny) is the editor of the Riverdale Gazette, but his activism flounders in the face of corporate pressure. Like youth leading the way: The parents are weighed down by the compromises of adulthood, while the teenagers use art and science to save the day. Like even nepotism: Veronica goes through the poor-little-rich-girl syndrome when she starts paying the price for her father’s reputation. Having said that, not all of it works. The movie narrative and comic-book treatment remain at odds with each other. Overwritten lines like “these trees are the stories of our past generations; if we lose our stories, who are we?” belong to the Zoya Akhtar Voiceover multiverse. You almost expect Kabir from Made In Heaven to pop up with his camera and pretentious thought farts.
Maybe the visual artifice is supposed to be a character in a town that’s learning to flaunt its flesh and blood. Except, it feels like The Truman Show where nobody is in on the gag. The environmental angle makes you wonder if, by saving the trees, the teens end up denying publishers the paper to print comics on – thereby erasing their own existence. (A Barbie-inspired plot, if there was ever one). In short, the craft lacks the spark and fluidity that distinguished Akhtar’s previous films. Still, it’s hard not to admire the choices made by this one. It’s hard not to be disarmed by the appraisal of Archie’s cultural footprint, in an age that equates ordinariness with innocuity. It implies that there is life within Riverdale, not just beyond it. It indicates that there can be heart-felt truths within hand-drawn comics. You come for the history, but stay for the rewriting of it.