Mickey 17, Nadaaniyan, The Waking of a Nation: Reviews This Week

Mickey 17: Will The Real Bong Joon-ho Please Stand Up?

With Mickey 17 , director Bong Joon-ho crafts a scathing mixtape of all he’s ever done and thought. The result is so much that it’s almost not enough. It’s so dense that it sacrifices something in pursuit of everything. Rahul Desai reviews.

Dir: Bong Joon-ho

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo

Playing in: Theatres

DIRECTOR BONG (Joon-ho) smokes two pipes of social critique. The first is real-world satire that smells like science-fiction fantasy: Parasite is an example. The specific and universal class rage at the core of Parasite is so unnerving that it feels imaginary. A lot of its critical acclaim stemmed from the near-implausible oppression in it. The second is science-fiction fantasy that exudes real-world satire. Okja, Snowpiercer and The Host belong to this populated category — combining apocalyptic vision, on-the-nose allegories, anti-capitalist angst and The-Hudsucker-Proxy-coded staging to deliver tragicomic blends of cinema and commentary. Mickey 17 is the newest entry in this life-is-stranger-than-fiction category, and it’s the greediest of them all. Joon-ho crafts it like a scathing mixtape of all he’s ever done and thought. The result is so much that it’s almost not enough. It’s so dense that it sacrifices something in pursuit of everything.

Based on the book Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, Mickey 17 starts with an all-timer premise: the man who’s tired of dying. Escaping danger (and loan sharks) on Earth, Mickey Barnes signs up to be an “Expendable” on a spaceship that’s on a four-year journey to colonise a distant planet named Nilfheim. Which means he’s a human guinea pig for any dangerous experiment, vaccine and mission: hired to die multiple times only to get ‘reprinted’ by a cloning machine that was banned on Earth.

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Nadaaniyan: Where Are We Headed?

I am all for the resurgence of rom-coms but it is impossible to feel anything for the characters, and by extension the actors, when their jawlines perform better than them. Both Khushi Kapoor and Ibrahim Ali Khan are painful to watch, writes Ishita Sengupta .

Dir: Shauna Gautam

Cast: Khushi Kapoor, Ibrahim Ali Khan, Dia Mirza, Mahima Chaudhry, Sunil Shetty, Jugal Hansraj

Streaming on: Netflix

HISTORY IS PROOF that the most memorable Hindi films have centred on impossible deals. I will offer some examples. In Raj Kanwar’s Judaai (1997), a wife sold her husband to another woman for a briefcase of cash. In Satish Kaushik’s Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rehte Hain (1999), the two principal characters enter into a one-year marriage contract; in S. Shankar’s Nayak: The Real Hero (2001), a journalist makes a deal with a chief minister to fill in his shoes for a day. Apart from finding Anil Kapoor, the actor present in all three films, either brokering deals or being brokered in such agreements, the instances highlight the commonality of these segues.

It is, therefore, not surprising that in Nadaaniyan , the latest charity project for 'nepo-babies' from Dharmatic Entertainment, the conceit is repeated. Pia Jai Singh (Khushi Kapoor), a poor little rich girl in Delhi cracks a deal with the newest nerd-entrant in her plush school, Arjun Mehta (Ibrahim Ali Khan making his debut) to be her pretend boyfriend after she has a misunderstanding with her two best friends. If you are questioning how that is going to help, then you are focussing on the wrong problem. Arjun does not. He agrees for Rs 25,000 per week which, taking the rising inflation into account, is not the smartest deal. But then nothing about Nadaaniyan is smart — not the direction, not the filmmaking and not the writing. The protagonists of Shauna Gautam’s directorial debut are so dull that many years later, if someone draws up a ranking of the most unremarkable leads in Hindi cinema, Pia and Arjun, although deserving, will not feature even in it. They are that forgettable.

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Ram Madhvani's The Waking Of A Nation Is Too Busy Teaching Us A History Lesson

The Waking of a Nation unravels with the pesky craft of a student’s project where subtexts are spelt out, and actors who look like they were born post-2013 are cast as revolutionary leaders, and dialogues appear to be written by kids.

Dir: Ram Madhvani

Cast: Taaruk Raina, Sahil Mehta, Bhawsheel Singh Sahni, Nikita Dutta

Streaming on: Sony LIV

OF LATE , Indian history has proved to be the most fertile fodder for storytellers. Take any week in the last year or so and there would be at least one film or show premised around historical events. One could debate over their veracity but the link is undeniable. Ram Madhvani’s The Waking of a Nation, the series centring around the pre-Independence Jallianwala Bagh tragedy, originates from the same space. But it unravels with such abject dullness that it sidesteps the usual questions about propaganda and crashes into a flat lesson in history.

Madhvani is a competent filmmaker. More crucially, he is someone who can lend inventiveness to familiar set ups. In Neerja (2016), he took the known story about the 1986 Pan Am Flight 73 hijack and made it into a personal story by focussing on the valiant air hostess Neerja Bhanot and the vital role she played in rescuing the passengers. In his debut series, Aarya (based on the Dutch show Penoza ) he took the premise of a drug cartel and designed it as a coming of age story of the titular protagonist.

— IS

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