Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005)

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

So on 16 September 2008, I finally got to watch this film on Zee Cinema in UK. I had been dying to watch this film for some time now! I love biographical films like Sardar, Legend of Bhagat Singh, Gandhi, JFK and other films like. The reason being that these are the types of films that are made only after a ton of research has been done.But Bose, I did not enjoy! Why? Because of its cheap production values and crappy acting. Sachin started off brilliantly, portraying Bose wonderfully but then everything started looking cheap and executed in a hurry.This film should have been an epic but it lacked everything that would have brought closer to being an epic! Cinematography at times was just simple, boring and unattractive. The wide angle lens were used very badly.Dialogues were just plain stupid at times.Sound Mixing was stupid at moments.The way INA was portrayed very badly.The army movements were stupid! I really wish that they had used some real Military Advisers. The drunk solider scene was just pointless! The 600 South Indian soldiers' scene was pointless!!! The actor was portraying as Hitler was very inappropriate! The scene in Kabul where Sufi Saint and his followers were singing was totally pointless and dragged for too long, unnecessarily! Those two cops outside Bose's house were stupid characters and had no value! The Austrian secretary character was pretty much useless and acted very badly! She was trying to act in a Bollywood-ish manner which did not suit her at all! The special effects/computer effects were horrendous! They were blowing spitfires off with hand grenades! You can damage a spitfire but you can not destroy a plane with grenade like that! The explosion animation/effect that was used to blow up the planes at night was used again and again, and even in daytime when they were blowing up the tanks when INA is attacking India.The train shot in the beginning of the film were shot very badly and without any invention and creativity! Two times, same shots were used twice in the film! The infrastructure that was shown around in the film, definitely didn't look like it was from 1930s 1940s.The cheating shots such as, when Bose were attending the INA parade in Singapore or Japan, didn't look like either of those countries. They were clearly shot in India.When INA is finally marching towards India,they are attacked by British planes. This as done with computer graphics but the planes were so obviously just black blobs flying! They didn't even bother to fix it so that the tree that were between the planes and road were between the planes and road. To put it short, computer effects sucks big time! They would probably look OK in a Pakistani film! lol! Overall this film was just 2, 2 out of 25!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! RUBBISH!!! RUBBISH!!! RUBBISH!!!!

Yes, the movie fails on a number of cases- especially character development of Bose himself. It seems to me the whole thing was written and directed in haste. Further, some of the scenes were absolutely unnecessary (what is the need for a showing a German U-Boat firing a torpedo at a ship in this movie). Some of the war scenes were also very badly done. One expected a lot more from a director of Benegal's reputation. I thought the lead actor was very good but again fell short of expectations. But I would ask all Indians to watch the movie. BeThe movie wakes you up to the life and struggles of this hero. Before this I didn't know too much about the man.

Bose, a movie, an understatement that lingers starkly loud in the memory space. The brilliance of Benegal matches with the effortless éclat of some of the best names in the Indian movie industry to create this classic of sorts. Looking back at the attempts of Indian directors at recreating the lives and contributions of the few men that remain unforgotten in the Indian freedom struggle, this depiction of one of the most influential yet neglected heroes of those times, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, stands apart for its simplicity and eye for detail and proximity with historical facts. A few movies that I can think of in this league would be The Legend of Bhagat Singh by Santoshi, Sardar by Ketan Mehta(a master piece, which I don't know why everyone seems to have forgotten), and of course Gandhi. Looking back, also at all these works makes me feel all these have been the best efforts of the respective directors. So is Bose Benegal's best work? Well I would agree that it is his most elaborate, ambitious work till date, and I am least interested in comparing his other works, because all his movies are so original and distinct in their genres, like Zubeidaa, Sooraj Ka Saatva Ghoda or may be Sardari Begum, for that matter. Bose works, and works magically, at various conscious and sub-conscious levels. It is a decent and honest attempt at depicting a forgotten phase in Indian history without even the slightest pinch of controversy or contempt, amidst the mist of Quit India and Gandhi, a phase no less substantial. It invokes a respect for the great work and ideals the man stood for, and still continues to inspire many generations alive and those yet to come. Another feat of the movie is the slick narrative and editing that holds the entire length of the movie with effortless flow. Khedekar is highly impressive, with his distinctive style of natural acting without any pretense or desperate attempts at imitating Netaji. But at the same time, he succeeds at the same with a surprising sensibility and spontaneity. A special mention for the mellifluous score by Rahman, which magnifies the grandeur and gives an identity to the plot. Take a bow, Benegal, Rahman and Khedekar! This one's for every Indian at heart!

I watched this film at its world premiere at the Harvard Film Archive yesterday night (Feb 11). I went to the movie with certain amount of expectation given the subject matter and the caliber of the director. However, I was bitterly disappointed and, moreover, embarrassed by this film about Bose. Bose is a little known personality in the history of Indian independence outside of India and his contribution has been overlooked inside India for 50 years primarily due to his differences with the Gandhi-Nehru axis. As a story, Bose's biography reads like a thriller and ultimately a tragedy, and hence make a great material for a film. Shyam Benegal has been one of the leaders of alternate (non-Bollywood) cinema in India for over two decades and has made some of the best and definitive (at least in my opinion) interpretation of Indian history and effect of historical episodes on common people in cinema. His television series based on Nehru's "Discovery of India" stands out as one of the best TV series made not only in India but through the world. "Making of Mahatma", his last attempt at biographical movie about an Indian leader was a very respectable movie even if it was hampered by low budget and had some excellent acting and, importantly, more depth and a fairer balance of personality of Mahtma Gandhi than Richard Attenborough's influential film. Thus, ignoring his dismal attempts at commercial movies recently, Benegal could be interpreted as a worthy descendant of the likes of Satyajit Ray, and one could bemoan his lack of exposure in the international market. "Bose: a Forgotten Hero" was seen by many of his admirers as a comeback for this worthy director to his field of expertise. I liked the way the movie started abruptly in 1940 at the moment of Bose's resignation as the president of the INC and the script's strategy of concentrating on the events of only the last 5 years of his life. Bose's rise and fall in the hierarchy of Congress Party would itself make an full-length political movie and hence was wisely discarded by the screenwriters. The story of his dramatic escape from India, under house-arrest by the British Government & under media glare, his earnest, if misguided, attempt at forming military alliance with the Italians/Germans/Russians/Japanses forces, and finally, his failed attempt at invading India in the last days of WW2 are brought to screen in astaggering 222 minutes. The movie is structured into three sectionsdealing with one each of the three plot lines mentioned above. Thescreenplay is more or less accurate in storyline. However, it has the ultimate flaw of historical movies, which tend to treat everybody, including Bose, like caricatures. Long screenplays trying to capture the life of a person can be excused for having some of these flaws. The problem with *this* movie is that, it seems completely unedited (note some of the scenes where the camera is not even in focus). I wonder if Benegal just finished shooting and clamped together every frame he shot without even an attempt at editing. Given what I saw on screen, this movie could have been salvaged by a crisper editing to make a more fast-paced movie. As it is, the film feels more suited to be a PBS mini-series than a feature length movie. If that was the only problem with the film, I could still live with it. However, it also had the added problem of shoddy acting on part of almost every single character. Sachin Khedekar, a television actor of TV soap operas was perhaps chosen for this role because of his resemblance to S.C. Bose. He did not put much effort into understanding his character and his acting was worthy of any day-time TV soap. Some supporting acting was good but mostly seemed to be cast of filler. All the international characters seemed like non-actors picked randomly from streets who were uncomfortable being on screen or were over-compensating for lack of talent by over-acting. The romance between Bose and his Greman secretary comes out without any credibility not just because of the lack of any screen intimacy between the characters (notice how the characters rarely even touched each other, leave alone kiss on screen. As the head of the censor board of India, Benegal is well known for his puritanical/conservative views on sex) but also because of really bad acting. Even the cleverest of editing would have not been able to mask this deficiency in the movie. Lastly, I must comment on the "bollywoodization" aspect of this movie. The movie has some of the worst and most embarrassing melodrama I have seen in ages. There were SO MANY moments through the movie where the audience were bursting out with unintended giggles because of the almost campy nature of dialogs. I would be the first one to confess that Indians are a melodramatic people in general and presence of melodrama in Indian movies, even historical, is an integral part. Melodrama *does* work in Bollywood movies in enhancing the emotional impact. In this movie, however, all it does is to cheapen the storyline and, furthermore, near the end of the movie, even feels insulting when the INA soldiers are shown in such inane melodramatic state. It adds nothing to the emotional impact and takes a lot away from the tragedy being played out on screen. I think the subject deserved more respect from the actors and the director than this. This movie is hard to digest for even the Indian audience who know the history of S.C.Bose and are used to Bollywood. I wonder what message it would give to international viewers about Indian films and about Bose. To do any justice to Bose, I seriously believe, this movie should not be shown in public. I will end the review with the advice not to see this movie unless you are studying film-making, in which case, this movie is great example of how a movie should NOT be made.