The Rising : A review cum rant

This rant was long pending,

I have been a long time fan of Amir Khan. Part of this was his histrionic ability as well as his unassuming persona insharp contrast to maverick Shahrukh Khan or downright criminal Salman Khan. On the other hand Ketan Mehta is a equally capable director having been at the helm of such movies like Bhavani Bhavai and Mirch Masala.

What is more Indian cinema (or atleast Bambayya cinema) doesnt have a tradition of historical narratives, almost all the films which came earlier were more in line of epics and story telling,
I had enjoyed many of them in childhood and found the dramatics appealing.
However I wanted to see how Aamir and Ketan balance historical narrative with dramatics that our films require.

This ofcourse is not easy. Hardly anything is known about Mangal Pandey and his ideas.
Most of books about him have been sketchy and based on much speculation.

To cut a long story short I was eagerly awaiting for this movie.

Well the movie was worse than disappointment.

It had the usual shortcoming that a typical hindi movie is supposed to have.

In order to add more flesh to Mangal's character his love life was invented.
Now there are two problems in this , it is ok to reinterpret and add on mythological stories.
However if working on historical character (which Mangal Pandey is), it is best to stay true to the real, since their was not much concrete to begin with I could understand ifa bit of romance was added, but making a parallel story of it seemed a bad idea.

The worst infraction, however was using Mangal Pandey as a symbol against liberalization and free market.

Many times in the movie Toby Stephens in explaination of colonial system referred to it as free market.

I am not an economist but even I can see distinction between free market which essentially is based on choice of buyers and sellers to trade on mutually acceptable terms and price and Colonialism which involves forcing others to buy at high prices or sell at low prices.

This slant was with doubt a cheap shot at current globalization, which is the favourite strwamen of our intellectuals, they are living in a decreipt utopia dreaming of rotten ideologies. They feel that globalization is a monster which must be opposed.

I think this comes from unnatural fetish with idealogies and intellectual sloth. One of the charges against religon is that it sets false ideals, I don't see how is secular version any better.