On the evening of December 1st, I was lucky enough to attend the first screening of the highly anticipated Hindi musical film, “The Archies.” The film, available for Netflix streaming, tells the reimagined story of The Archie Comics set in 1960s India. It follows Archie, Betty, Veronica, and friends as they grapple with the complexities of their relationships and futures, whilst fighting to save Riverdale from developers who are plotting to destroy their cherished Green Park. The movie is packed with a star-studded cast including several Bollywood star kids: Agastya Nanda, Khushi Kapoor, and Suhana Khan.
Vedang Raina, Dot, Mihir Ahuja, and Yuvraj Menda complete the main cast—with the former two making their film debut. The screening took place ahead of the premiere in India and was hosted by fashion designer Prabhal Gurung at the iconic Paris Theater. The attendees included many high-profile South Asian creatives like Kal Penn, Sarita Choudhary, Anjula Acharia, writer and producer Reema Kagti, and director Zoya Akhtar. Before I get into my thoughts on the film, please note that there will be spoilers in the rest of this article, so feel free to stop reading here if you want to avoid them!
As an avid Riverdale fan throughout middle school, my inner 13-year-old was ecstatic at the thought of being able to attend this event. I had seen the trailer for “The Archies” when it was first released and was beyond anticipation for this new twist on the classic Archie Comics characters. To say it simply, I had pretty high hopes.
The film is organized around a main storyline along with smaller subplots that are developed and addressed in the first half of the film. The main storyline followed the friends’ challenge to save their beloved town park from developers who are attempting to build a hotel in its place and close the surrounding local businesses. I found this to be slightly cliché, as it follows the classic trope of an “evil developer” taking over the main characters’ hometown — we can see variations of this in classics like “The Goonies” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” This trope by itself doesn’t hurt the movie, but combined with the subplots, it all fell a bit flat for me.
The first subplot is a classic love triangle between Archie, Betty, and Veronica. If I’m being completely honest, this entire subplot made me dislike Archie’s character early on — he two-timed two best friends and excused it by claiming that he loved them both! This subplot also took up quite a bit of screen time, which made it feel slightly repetitive as Archie went back and forth between Betty and Veronica until they found out, confronted him, and forgave him (what!?) Because of that outcome, this subplot didn’t add much to the larger plot because, in the end, the relationships between the three characters were essentially the same as in the beginning.
The second subplot was executed a little better than Archie’s love triangle, in my opinion. It followed Dilly as he struggled with his unrequited crush on Reggie whilst not having come out to his friends yet. They did a great job building the tension between these two characters all the way to the climax of this subplot. Although the two characters don’t end up together (despite my desperate wishes), Reggie eventually confronts Dilly about his crush and there’s a sweet scene where Reggie lets him down nicely while promising not to tell the others, which was a great way to wrap up this storyline (apart from the two characters being endgame, of course).
Moving on from the story itself, “The Archies” was had great music and choreography. The original songs were catchy, well-written, unique, and incorporated well into the film, and the actors all danced skillfully to the well-staged choreography. This film was slightly lengthy, with a runtime of 2 hours and 21 minutes. Although lengthiness isn’t always a disadvantage, it hurt this film more than it helped it, because the movie definitely felt longer than it needed to be. There are quite a few scenes that could’ve been cut to make the entire film more palatable. The entire first half of the film is spent mostly on the subplots with only the beginnings of the Green Park storyline, and by the second half of the movie, the subplots are mostly finished and the movie switches gears entirely to complete the Green Park storyline. I don’t think it was necessary to devote so much screentime to the subplots, especially the love triangle.
Overall, this movie didn’t fully meet my expectations, but that also may be because I had admittedly high expectations for a teen coming-of-age musical movie. The high point for me in the film was undoubtedly the music — I will definitely be looking up a few of the songs to listen to on my own. If you’re looking for a feel-good, nostalgic, and entertaining flick to watch, make sure to watch “The Archies”, available for streaming on Netflix!