Ashoka is one of the great characters of India. His symbol, the Ashoka chakra graces the Indian flag. This movie takes this character and tries to turn it into a Bollywood hero/heroine/villain sob story and fails miserably.Yes, the music, cinematography and costumes are good and that's hardly sufficient. The movie fails at multiple levels. 1. It depicts Ashoka as a man guided by blind emotions that sway from defiance to obedience to mother to blind love to attempted forgiveness to sadness and depression to rage and anger and to blood lust and finally back to feeling sorry for oneself without ANY attempt at true regret. What evokes "dharma" in this man is seeing his lover hurt on the battlefield??? Really?? The battlefield is surrounded with corpses, blood and widows while men are being whipped ceaselessly by his army and he claims to suddenly discover "dharma"? 2. There is ZERO attempt to show any precepts of Buddhism which is what guided the real Ashoka. Reciting Buddhist chants is NOT Buddhism!!! 3. The story is completely disjointed and ridiculous juxtaposition of stories that lead to no meaning except this man allowing himself to be jerked around from one situation to another! 4. The India of the Gupta empire time is very unlikely to have had scantily clad women dancing around seductively. Ashoka's wife Devi is supposedly a Budhist and she's dressed to show off all her feminine assets. That's not what a princess would have done in her day! 5. The battle scenes are almost childish and pathetically filmed. Even older, black and white movies had better battle scenes!Epics based on Indian history deserve far, FAR better than this sorry excuse of a film. By all means make formula Bollywood films of boy meets girl type but do not defile historic characters in the process.

The people who like the plot, like it because King Ashoka's life and philosophy were great. The movie is stupid! Acting specially sucks. Ashoka's life deserves better than a stinking heap of irrelevant music sequences , bad actors and illogical dialogs. Bollywood has produced far better movies on history and this is nowhere near them. Ashoka's change of perception was supposed to be the awesomest and most inspiring part of the movie which they ruined with shallow approach. Neither the dialogs nor the visual aspects have been successful in that. As an actor SRK looks better because other actors are even worse than him. Few scenes like his mother's death, his wrath and violence and his post war visit of the battleground are OK but don't make the movie any better.A whole universe of Indian heroes and philosophers need to be revealed to the world, who till date are buried under darkness. I am expecting movies with more depth in future.

When the ace cinematographer holds the megaphone what would you expect? Nothing but ethereal beauty on the silver screen. SRK:: For once he should be appreciated to have backed the project as a producer. All things said and done, it cannot be denied that he has taken leap of faith number of times in his career resulting in phenomenal success in his graph. Yes, Asoka falls into the same category. He gives his best to breathe life into the character of Asoka. The character is shown to be torn between the love for his mother, Kaurwaki and motherland. Kareena Kapoor:: Certainly you would carry the image of Kaurwaki for a few decades to come. Last time it was Rekha in "Utsav" and maybe Vyjayanthimala in "Amrapali". The cinematographer has left no stone unturned to present her in the best light possible. Her character is fleshed out strongly and therefore Kareena gets lots of scope to showcase her talent. Danny:: Reliable.Rahul Dev:: Good writing was warranted to make the character leave an lasting impression. Otherwise he demonstrated a well-chiselled frame.Hrishita Bhatt: Decent performance considering the scope of her character. Sadly Asoka could not do much value-addition to her standing in Bollywood.Ajith:: Down-south I am sure he was a huge heart-throb. Sadly went un- noticed in Bollywood. Additionally there was no meat in the character. Enigmatic lyrics were translated into melodious numbers by Anu Mallik, they were in top-form indeed,. Chroreography was top-notch. Special mention to Gayatri Jayaraman and Rajlaxmi R. Roy who featured in the "Raat Ka Nasha" & "Aa Tayar Ho Ja" songs. Sadly 'Asoka' ended up being compared to 'Lagaan' which released around the same time and therefore did not garner the due patrons.

600 horses, 50 elephants, 6,000 extras together on the battlefield, as another reviewer wrote, and they are not able to put together a decent battle scene. That is something of an achievement. The After-the-battle-scenes on the field were gritty and intense, but the actual battle was lousily edited and suffered from a ridiculous pseudo martial arts style in plastic-lookalike pieces of armor.The acting was terrible, even the extras hammed it up. Only redemption here was the Khalinga-General. I also have to admit that the evil Asoka was well done by Shahrukh Khan who otherwise either left a noticeable amount of slime on the screen when not totally overacting.The story was good but butchered, the dialogue awful, character development believable where the actors didn't strangle their characters to death, and set pieces worth millions were simply put to waste. I am sorry for that.It was my first Bollywood experience. Some call this to be a finest among Bollywood Movies. If this is the case, I better skip the rest of the bunch. Horrible.