Ground Zero, the latest Bollywood film based on real-life military operations, comes at a time when the nation is mourning the loss of the lives of those tourists in Pahalgam. The release date of the film being this Friday is purely coincidental, and perhaps this timing sort of works in favor of the movie as that factor subconsciously makes us assess this movie beyond its craft. The hammy dialogues and the predictable beats of the drama do not help the film to be something that does anything beyond the mere documenting of an actual event. But what was surprisingly better was the fact that it wasn’t a delusional, jingoistic film.
The movie is based on the real-life mission executed by BSF officer Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey to kill Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Ghazi Baba. The story is set in the period 2001 to 2003, during which a lot of militant activities happened in Jammu and Kashmir, and some of it had links with the infamous attack on the parliament. What we see in Ground Zero is the efforts taken by Dubey to nab Ghazi Baba by carefully monitoring the activities through his available sources in BSF.
Even though the trailer of this movie has this “How’s the Josh, High Sir” kind of energy, Ground Zero feels slightly different from all other derivatives of Uri that came from Bollywood because it is more focused on what is the core issue with the unending tension in J&K. There are moments in the movie, where they even show the Indian Army in a grey zone, where the people in power had to create a narrative to maintain peace. While this approach is somewhat refreshing to see, the writing is not able to find the same freshness in the way it approaches the script. The linear narration of the story just couldn’t build any sort of intrigue in our minds, and it was more like a flat narration of events and efforts.
Directed by Tejas Prabha Vijay Deoskar, Ground Zero is happening totally from the perspective of the army and the people in Kashmir who want peace. We rarely get to see the face or voice of Ghazi Baba, and there are no cinematic liberties taken here to create a showdown between the hero and the villain. The idea is to focus on the uncertainty of a soldier’s life in a place like Jammu and Kashmir, where even the army can’t guess who has been brainwashed. There is even a subplot in the movie where Dubey focuses on educating the mindsets of future generations rather than punishing them. But like I said, the heavy-handed nature of all these dialogues clubbed with age-old cliches, like how we can predict the death of a character when he or she starts to act way too confident, are shown here as well.
Emraan Hashmi has done a fairly good job of being Narendra Dubey. It is that agitated and slightly loud character, and we have not really seen him in such a space. While that freshness is there, we can see him being unsure about how loud he should go with this role. Sai Tamhankar plays the role of the supportive and understanding wife of the hero. Even though it is not an extensive role, she is pretty believable in whatever scenes she has. Zoya Hussain, Mukesh Tiwari, Deepak Parmesh, Lalit Prabhakar, etc., are the other character actors in the film.
It is actually disappointing that the writing of Ground Zero couldn’t achieve the thematic maturity of the film. The kind of juxtaposition they did in that parliament attack sequence was actually a pretty smart one. The less jingoistic tone of this movie deserved a similar treatment with minimal spoon-feeding through dialogues. Unfortunately, they couldn’t sustain it, maybe due to the pressure to be the next Uri.
The less jingoistic tone of this movie deserved a similar treatment with minimal spoon-feeding through dialogues. Unfortunately, they couldn't sustain it, maybe due to the pressure to be the next Uri
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
