The Attacks of 26/11

To depict and chronicle important events in the history of a nation through cinema as a medium is both necessary and important to the collective memory of a people. To go ahead and make a macabre insensitive mockery of something as abominable as the 26/11 attacks of Mumbai is not just deplorable but also should be punishable by law. RGV deserves the gallows for playing with the sensitivities of everyone in such a dastardly tasteless fashion as the movie.

RGV chooses to tell his tale through the eyes of the joint commissioner of Mumbai at the time of the attacks as he disposes between a commission. Nana Patekar plays the commissioner in what is perhaps the only mentionable attempt at acting in a film that cries for some sensible performance. What follows are slo mos of terrorists sltting the heads of men, women, children, spilling shiny blood all acorss the screen for about two hours before Kasab is hanged and the misery comes to an end.

Now there is no denying the gore of the attacks and the macabre dance of death that the nation saw for three days. What is questionable is that is it necessary to sit through all of it in such insensitive depiction with pop corn in hand? That too when RGV decides to cast absolute nitwits in pivotal roles who laugh like a hyena (kasab in an embarrasingly juvenile sequence) or smile uncontrollably as the camera pans at them when they are actually listening to Nana recount the horror in deposition! What was RGV thinking?

There have been films like Black Friday, Parzania, which have chronicled dark days of our history with finesse, not once masking the severity and gore of it all yet managing to jolt your consience, not revolt your gut into puking. RGV does the latter, with impunity of a terrorist himself- as deadpaneed and mechanical in his filming as perhaps the attackers were. The atttackers were not humans, is a known fact. What went wrong with RGV though?

Two gruesome hours after as i walked out of the theatre, I was wondering how a film like this gets released in the screens while the censor board sits cutting songs and midriffs in scenes from other films! RGV is a sick man who needs help. If this film does'nt make you believe me, try watching the trailer of his enxt, Satya 2.

First the good news! The camera angles are not going as berserk as RGV's previous films. His direction is calmer and he is less restless this time around. But, the background music is still ear shattering and the casting is all wrong. This film required a good casting director.

When you are recreating an event as recent as the attacks of 26/11 the least a director can do is get the right set of actors to make the film look believable. RGV fails big time on this count. Though, Nana Patekar performs to the best of his ability. It almost looked like he is in a separate film of his own.

The film focuses on the attacks on CST, Taj, Leopold Caf\xe9 and Cama hospital and is also based on Kasab's confession. Told from the point of view of Nana Patekar it is looking at the events from that perspective.

RGV focuses so much on stylizing and crafting the scenes that the film comes across devoid of any emotion of what we all felt while it was happening.

Word of mouth - A film like this deserved the RGV of Satya not the RGV we know now. This could have been his fight back film. Alas!

Rating - ** \xbd ( Average)

Ticket Meter - worth 100 bucks

Sensationalist, insensitive, absurdly stereotypical in its portrayal of terrorism, and rarely insightful, Attacks is a borderline fascist retelling of a dastardly act this country was victim to.

It is important for cinema as a medium to document the crucial events that take place in the nation; as I firmly believe more than anything, film can be a fabulous chronicler of times. But what Verma does with the 26/11 bomb attacks that killed people in unimaginable numbers, and shocked the entire nation just because of its sheer audacity, is something unforgivable.

And yet people will flock to the theaters to see the dramatic, and if I may, a glamorized recap of something everybody would want to forget. At least not be reminded in the way that RGV makes us : a laughing Buddha perched on the corner of the frame while bullets silence the cheer out of the Taj lobby. Even babies aren't spared. His excuse could be that he's doing it on the pretext of realism. But Mr. Verma taking cinematic liberties doesn't only mean you take them because you enjoy the freedom to abuse them. Certain elements could have been entirely eliminated and the overbearing background score could have been toned down, because these are real lives you are seeing getting massacred and not a fictional tale.

Honestly, I had problems chewing corn and sipping coffee while watching how cruelly my city and some of my favorite landscapes that comprise the city were burnt. It was nauseatic and headache-inducing. I just was unable to see it. And it is not a matter of losing objectivity, or not having the courage to watch the event unfold. It is simply about how voyeuristic the entire exercise looks, and how redundant this nasty film is in terms of lending any kind of perspective or insight into what really happened.

When a man is knocked down by a speeding car, or falls of a train, a crowd of people gather around to see him bleed. Very few will help, others will just watch deriving some evil pleasure out of it, or probably they feel standing there alone is of some use. RGV understands that shadowy mentality and the attacks of 26/11 is nothing but a sickening attempt to capitalize on a regrettable incident that is either ways, an inseparable part of the history of this country.

I don't want to talk about Nana Patekar because I do not understand why he'd agree to do the film in the first place.

The Attacks of 26/11 should have just been called: Attack. I'll leave you to figure why. It is based on the terrorist attack in Mumbai on 26^th November 2008. When I am being shown a film based on tragic events like this, it better be a great film, anything less is unacceptable. I'm not expecting a masterpiece but I'm only expecting a film that deserves to be its cinematic representation. It must be informative, powerful and leave me with questions. It would help if there is a plot, or a story or at least we get to know some characters who are affected by it. I did get a cinematic depiction but the information given was something TV news channels had already done. There is no plot, just an arc highlighting the events from the attacks to the final resolution, which occurred in November 2012. There are two characters - the hero and the villain. But we don't get to know them; or what we do get to know is unimaginative and tawdry to say the least. If you want to witness disturbing images, you get them.

For most part of the film I was angry, I did not want to see these events again. I was living in Bombay during the attacks. The streets were chillingly empty, the atmosphere was excruciatingly tense. For weeks we were glued to the news or hearing horrifying anecdotes. Do we want to relive that again? I did not wish for old wounds to be reopened. If nothing, wounds should be healed. Filmmakers must understand mass tragedies are not the best subjects for films. Nobody wants to see it all again unless you have some sadistic wish of hitting the raw nerves, or actually squishing and badgering them.

It seems Ram Gopal Varma has no idea about any of this. Sure some catharsis is offered in the end but is it really? Adding to that, filmmaking skills are entirely abandoned. The scenes are directed so poorly I was having a hard time believing this was one of India's best filmmakers at a point. Lots of intense music and over the top ideologies being thrown back and forth. It's not that it doesn't work, given the subject, but it doesn't work well either... given the subject.

Nana Patekar plays a police commissioner. We seem him speaking to an inanimate committee about the events that occurred. This framing device literally spoon-feeds the audience with what they should feel. He talks in histrionics, telling us what to feel and when. Really now? We already had a sense of what happened in 2008, now we are going to be told to feel something? Don't we already feel strongly about it? At a point in the film Nana Patekar fixes himself in front of TV screens showing the news and he just looks on, not knowing what to think or what to do about it. RGV expects the audience to be zombies like this. We don't need to think, just watch the images with our mouths open.

There are 4 scenes which show the actual shootings, one at Leopold Caf\xe9, the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus and Cama Hospital. These scenes are just sensational visual reconstructions. These are distressing sequences but must I see a child crying in the middle of this mayhem while the terrorists wait and let Ramu have his dramatic moment? Why must I see a scene where terrorists ask innocents for water and then shoot them? Probably because Ramu showing a couple of terrorists shooting people and then going into their house to get water wouldn't be dramatic enough. The intermission comes at a point where a police constable looks at the carnage at CST and sits down to weep uncontrollably. This angered me to the bone. What sort of sadism is this? Why is he bawling like he was in an episode of a melodramatic and tacky television soap manipulating his way into the audience's vulnerable emotions? I refuse to believe that the events occurred like this.

Ben Affleck said in an interview recently that a filmmaker's career can be like a tuning fork. You hit it and it buzzes for a while and then it stops. When they hit their peak, they produce their best work (Unless you are Stanley Kubrick and tread carefully and turn everything you touch into gold). Ram Gopal Varma is the prefect example. His period ended with Sarkar (2005). Good movies came occasionally, like Rann (2010). He had the perfect opportunity to redeem himself and salvage his career from utter ruin but it's clear as day that his time is over. I wonder if this film was made during his peak, if we could have actually got a good film.

The tricky part with a film like this is if you give it a bad review it could be taken in the wrong way. I am only talking about the quality of the film here. I wish I was recommending it because I thought it was a great film, but it isn't. Using a country's collective trauma and amplifying it is not my idea of a film. Shame on RGV.

I have seen only one Ram Gopal Verma film in my life: Rangeela. I never got around to watch his critically-acclaimed crime dramas, his spate of horror films or even the universally hated recent misadventures. I do not understand the praise or the criticism he has received. Oh boy. I do now. The criticism.

The film opens with a Joint Commissioner of Police, accused of mishandling the fightback and botching up the subsequent investigation, deposing before a committee set up to uncover discrepancies. There are numerous ways to make a film around this historical event. Ramu could have made a film from one family's point of view; or about a slew of strangers caught in different parts of the city, struggling to stay alive. Instead, he chooses to make the all encompassing version which starts in the Arabian Sea and goes about, procedurally, wreaking havoc in all the places we now associate with the terror attacks. There's nothing wrong with Ramu's choice, per se, but the way he makes his movie. Leaving us with no one to relate to or root for, he insensitively turns most of his characters into mere props- bag of flesh and blood just waiting to take a bullet and spill their guts out. By taking this route, it never quite finds its unique voice.

The film claims this particular terror attack was far more shocking than 9/11 because of its "sheer audacity". I don't think I agree. I believed there was a massive intelligence failure and a major botch up by the city's Police, fueled by intrusive media coverage. The film's job was to convince me to believe otherwise; to consider the Joint Commissioner's account and reassess my views. It has clearly failed miserably. In its attempt to give some sort of catharsis, the film colors the cop clean while only coming across as a movie about one man saving his ass by telling us what we already knew. No one asks him any hard questions. The 'committee' is basically a bunch of suited extras, who have vowed to never open their mouth, giving reaction shots.

I expected the film to put the lone captured terrorist Ajmal Kasab on a pedestal. Ramu does exactly that, and more, by turning Kasab into a poster child. His representation of terrorists is so basic that I couldn't believe someone once considered this guy a great director. With terrorists putting on their best scary face, shaking their guns in fury as they pump bullets into all the underpaid extras, the whole atmosphere becomes very caricaturish. From the CCTV images, Kasab looked like an excited kid out on a field trip. But Ramu's Kasab is all Bharat Mata ki Maa ki, foaming at the mouth with fury. He was lucky enough to find a guy who sort of resembled Kasab, but he tortures the poor guy to act when he clearly can't.

The direction is so bad you wouldn't believe. This is the kind of vision which was passable in the 90s Bollywood. But at a time when we are getting movies like Zero Dark Thirty, it is mind-boggling to have Ramu expect us to keep a straight face while looking at a shot of terrorists walking around, with a statue of a Hindu deity in the foreground, and dhoom tana dhoom tana music playing in the background.

The Attacks of 26/11 is an insensitive, amateurishly directed film. Ramu is the only filmmaker in the entire world who got an opportunity to visit the ruins of Taj Mahal Palace. It's a real shame he couldn't make a half decent movie out of his first hand experience. It is grim and grotesque just for the sake of it. Avoid at all costs.