Watch: awesome special effects from the "Indian Terminator"

When one thinks of Indian cinema, Bollywood musicals and the films of Satyajit Ray usually come to mind. But last October, India's most expensive and highest-grossing movie of all time, Endhiran (or, The Robot), directed by a man I'll call the Subcontinental James Cameron, S. Shankar, put the world on notice that they're more versatile than that. The film took about a dozen years to make, from conception to release, and could be described as a mashup of The Terminator, Transformers, and The Matrix.

The story involves a Frankenstein's monster of an android robot whose program is upgraded to give it the ability to comprehend and generate human emotions. So of course it falls in love with the scientist's fiancee and is eventually re-engineered to do the evil bidding of a rival scientist. But the plot and Russian dubbing of the clip are irrelevant. All that matters are some of the most hypnotic special effects you've ever seen. If, like me, you don't mind watching the good parts with all the boring exposition cut out, you don't need to be a sci-fi fan to appreciate the spinning robot sphere, or the robot snake. Electromagnetism has never been so cool.