Movie critic Anupama Chopra reviewed R Madhavan’s newly launched film ‘Rocketry: The Nambi Effect’ to report the trouble with the subject’s Hindu faith and patriotism. Writing an evaluation of the film based on the life of Padma Bhushan Nambi Narayanan, Chopra stated that the film, again and again, highlighted Nambi’s patriotism and additionally leaned pointedly into his faith.

“It’s admirable that the movie has delivered Narayanan’s many accomplishments into the spotlight; however, the screenplay repeatedly underlines his patriotism and also leans pointedly into his faith,” she stated in the review published on July 1.

She added, “Our first visual of Narayanan is in the puja room at his home. At crucial moments, he prays. Narayanan is a true-blue Hindu patriot”. She then highlighted that Narayanan was so patriotic that he had refused a fat-paying job offered by NASA and that the film functions as a straight-up manifesto in defense of the man and his actions.

Chopra then tries to mock and build this idea that Nambi has been portrayed in a way that Tom Cruise’s Maverick from Top Gun might have admired him, adding, "Characters around Narayanan keep commenting on his swashbuckling brilliance with lines like, “You must be the real deal, Nambi!”, “You are an exceptional man, Nambi,”  “You are a dangerous man, Nambi,” and “Badi teekhi cheez ho tum.”

Chopra, meanwhile, called the multi-tasking of actor R Madhavan who wrote, directed, and produced the film, an act of ‘ambitious juggling’ which she said resulted in an over-simplistic result. “The ambitious juggling act has resulted in a well-intentioned film, moving in parts, but also clumsy — in content and craft — an overly simplistic.”

Declining a prestigious job in the United States, a 28-year-old prodigy graduating from one of the Ivy Leagues, Princeton, had chosen to return to the motherland when his future prospects looked bleak. Two decades later, Nambi Narayanan had not only pioneered the science of building India’s most celebrated space vehicles, PSLV and GSLV but also raised to be the country’s topmost cryogenic scientist.

The movie ‘Rocketry: The Nambi Effect’ is the story of one of India’s most outstanding space scientists, Nambi Narayanan. An exemplary achiever, instrumental in India’s space accomplishments only to be falsely implicated by a political-bureaucratic nexus in a bid to not only prevent the country’s technological progress but also to use it to further a bad political outcome. In the year 2021, the CBI stated that the false implication of former ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan had impacted the technological development of cryogenic in the country. It added that two former Kerala Police officers falsely implicated the scientist implicated by two former Kerala Police officers in a ‘concocted case’ that led to a delay in the development of India’s cryogenic technology.

She earlier criticized ‘The Kashmir Files’, SS Rajamouli’s ‘RRR’

This is not the first time that Anupama Chopra has criticized a movie for factually highlighting the Hindu flexure. Earlier this year, the ‘film critic,’ while reviewing the Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri-directed film ‘the Kashmir Files’, had blatantly denied that genocide of Hindus ever happened in Kashmir. The review had called the movie a bad attempt at propaganda or, worse, a “revisionist drama,” saying that the “film reimagines the exodus as a full-scale genocide – where every Hindu is a tragic Jew, every Muslim is a murderous Nazi.”

The review written by Chopra’s sidekick further read, “Even if I were to buy into the film’s dodgy worldview, the film-making is exploitative – geared towards riding the current wave of Hindu nationalism rather than empathizing with the displaced victims of history. None of it stems from an open space of understanding or curiosity, with the writing operating on only two extreme levels: lengthy discussions and all-out torture porn”.

The author also noted that the movie ended up reducing the Kashmiri Hindus to cultural corpses and that he was not sure whether the Muslims (who were villainized) should be more offended or the Hindus who were reduced to cultural corpses. Also, Chopra had published a piece decrying the popularity of SS Rajamouli’s recent release RRR in the USA, complaining that Americans are celebrating a toxic Hindutva movie that upheld Caste hierarchy and Kshatriya pride.

R Madhavan starrer, 'Rocketry: The Nambi Effect,’ the actor’s maiden directorial venture, was released on July 1. The movie is based on the life of former ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan, who was falsely charged with espionage in 1994. Later, Nambi Narayanan was awarded Padma Bhushan in 2019 on the occasion of the 70th Republic Day. Also, the Kerala government approved providing compensation of Rs 1.3 crore for his wrongful arrest and harassment by the Kerala Police in the 1994 spying case.

References:

opindia.com
filmcompanion.in