1 Line Review: The kind of movie Indians should be watching.
The day I booked my tickets for Airlift was the same day I read that the movie Dilwale became the 2nd highest grosser of 2015. And am sure for 2016 as well such movies will dominate the box office. If only movies like ‘Dum Laga Ke Haisa’, ‘Tanu Weds Manu Returns’, ‘Talvar’, ‘Baby’, ‘Angry Indian Goddesses’ become the top grossers of the year and then year on year. We would then be called a real mature audience.
Airlift is one such movie.
If you have seen ARGO and if you are even slightly aware of Airlift’s plot then you would just not be able to stop yourself from comparing the two. Argo was a much smaller operation involving airlifting of only 6 people. This one involved 1,70,000! Yes, that’s super-duper-huge task.
Airlift is based on a true story of 1990, when Saddam Hussain decided to attack Kuwait (reason of financial debt cited), almost 1.7L Indians were left stranded in the war zone and lucky for them, they were allowed to move out of the city. But moving out so many Indians from any given foreign place is no easy task. First of all, there should be authorities in India willing to do it. Even when there was a lot of casual attitude thrown on, in the initial days, Indian government and Air India eventually got together and agreed to airlift all the Indian stranded in Kuwait. 488 flights were run between Kuwait and Mumbai (a distance of over 4000 kms) and this was done continuously for 60 days. Air India actually holds a Guinness World Record for this work. No other evacuation mission has ever been performed at this large scale, ever.
Minus a couple of songs this would have been Hollywood’s answer to Argo. But we are not answering anyone. This is a great movie. Period. Songs are an integral part of any Bollywood movie and I did not mind a few of them in this movie as well. Dil De Di kind of rekindled my love for the Didi song which was a craze, even in India, during 90’s.
Akshay Kumar is an anchor in the movie and he excelled in his performance (Although I feel he gave a far better and much more challenging performance in BABY). Here the mixture of emotion and intensity were much higher though. Nimrat played the character very well. Watch out for that Iraqi major, his accent is funny; And also that one person among 1.7L people who will irritate you to the core (that means he acted very well). But the real winner were the sets and cinematography. The real portrayal of the situation was done very effectively.
Bonus: The grand daughter of the real life Airlift hero wrote about the mission > click here to read
