When I was watching this movie, I was simultaneously being hit by two things
1) - the ordinariness of the ’production’ quality. What is called ’production values’ - lighting, sound, authenticity of effect, bullets hitting people, the environment. See ’Saving Private Ryan’, ’Thin Red Line’, ’Black Hawk Down’, which have you shivering, and diving for cover as bullets fly. I know we don’t have the kind of money that they have, but as a member of the audience I have become terribly spoilt by Hollywood, what more can I say. Remember that I WANTED to like the movie, so I am not being careless when I comment that it came across as too artificial and stage like. All the hill storming scenes for e.g., are all from the same camera angle and all have a hill bathed in a uniform light, as if from a lamppost, and just did not pull me into forgetting it was happening on screen. I was too cognisant that I was watching from an aloof medium, a seat facing a stage on what this was all happening perhaps.
2) - The story , the challenges our men faced, their pain, their courage, the difficulty of the situation, all of that.
It struck me that as a movie buff, I should try to somehow be able to differentiate the two even in the midst of ’enjoying’ the movie. Differentiate all that is hitting me because of what happened out there from that which is hitting me only because of the way it has been treated / presented by JP. I found, limited as I was in my ability to do this, that despite my best wishes to conclude otherwise, I was being only ’moved’ by the facts of the former, and not at all by the effort of the latter. If a young guy, who is about to get married to his childhood fiancée dies while bravely storming a hill currently occupied by miserable mother*&£$£s I would strangle personally if I had the guts, its going to move me in tears by just hearing about it. What I couldn’t find was a camera angle, a single feature of the presentation that added to this impact. In fact, I will go so far as to claim that the artificiality of the treatment took away some of it.
That’s about it - was very moved by what the story had to convey, and the research etc has no doubt been brilliant, but as a celluloid ’creation’ , didn’t find any ’value add’ - as a documentary of what happened in itself its priceless, if only because film reaches out to a lot more people than any other media, including newspapers etc.