Sitaare Zameen Par, the spiritual sequel to the 2007 film Taare Zameen Par, does not achieve anything new with its story idea. It is your typical underdog story of a hopeless team pretty much doing something that wasn’t expected from them. While the beats of the script are extremely predictable, RS Prasanna manages to reduce the melodrama, making it an enjoyable experience overall.
Gulshan, the assistant coach of the Delhi Basketball team, is thrown out of the team for lack of discipline. When his recklessness reached the road, he was given the punishment of giving basketball training to a group of specially abled kids. How an insensitive Gulshan takes up this job and how it reforms him as an individual is what we see in Sitaare Zameen Par.
It is not a movie that is not self-aware. The intention is to create a feel-good drama about the idea of accepting people with their own levels of normal, and the messaging is pretty obvious. In fact, if you have seen the trailer, it has shown you pretty much everything, and you are not walking in to see something beyond that. But as I said, there is a consistent effort to make it less melodramatic and wordy. RS Prasanna and writer Divy Nidhi Sharma are giving those humorous tweaks to keep things lively.
Aamir Khan, with his usual set of expressions of arrogance, shock, and sentiments, fits into the tone of the movie, and he is not overdoing things like Laal Singh. The specially abled characters in the movie are played by actors with similar abilities, and they are all pretty good at portraying their respective parts. Gopi Krishna Varma, who played the part of Guddu has actually acted in a 2021 Malayalam film Thirike, directed by George Kora. Genelia, as Sunita, the wife character of Gulshan, did a fairly good job. Even though the screen time is minimal, both Dolly Ahluwalia and Brijendra Kala were hilarious in all their scenes.
I have not seen the original film, Champions. However, I think RS Prasanna and Divy Nidhi Sharma have tried to include certain new tracks in the story. From Gulshan’s hesitations in becoming a father to accepting the fact that his mother also can have a life, the movie is trying to normalize many things that we usually present as dark and grey in our films. I think those small detours from the core story were what gave Sitaare Zameen Par something exclusive, as everything else was just sugary goodness. The cinematography by G Srinivas Reddy opts for brightly lit frames with ample colors to keep things cheerful. The incorporation of the music into the narrative was fine, even though the album isn’t as great as Taare Zameen Par.
From his height to his own old songs (on two occasions), Aamir Khan is doing some really good self-deprecating humor bits in Sitaare Zameen Par. Despite the whole movie being a template, it is actually the breezy nature of the film, along with the simple humor, that keeps it upbeat even though it has more than 20 minutes of additional footage from the original. Sitaare Zameen Par is an extremely simplistic, fun film with minimal takeaways.
