A much-needed attack

Rahul Deo Bharadwaj

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The praise for debutant Sankalp Reddy’s Telugu Hindi bilingual war film The Ghazi Attack just does not seem to be ending. Till February last week, the earnings of the film had almost touched Rs 40 crore. The numbers overseas have also been impressive. The success of the film, which is based on the mysterious sinking of Pakistani submarine PNS Ghazi during the India-Pakistan War of 1971, is likely to give impetus to the genre of war thrillers in India.

Though India has fought five wars since Independence, we barely have had any war films. War thrillers is a genre which hasn’t largely been experimented with in Bollywood, which has been limiting the soldier hero to the role of a lover boy in most cases. In most Bollywood films, a soldier is in a love triangle. Farhan Akhtar’s Lakshya and J. P. Dutta’s Border had brief moments of war thrill but that was not the focus of the narrative. To be fair, within the limitations of the then distributor-financer dynamics, both Border and Lakshya attempted real war stories with good effect. Lakshya obviously had better production values. However, The Ghazi Attack scores on the fact that it is not just our first underwater war thriller, but that at no point does it lose focus on its main narrative objective of being a film on submarine warfare.

In a way, The Ghazi Attack can be compared to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. The eye for detail in this war-at-sea film is as sincere as in the American epic war drama. Of course, the makers of The Ghazi Attack did not have the kind of budget to attempt to make a film at such a grand scale.

The movie did not boast of any big names. Rana Daggubati’s commercial clout in Telugu cinema could outmatch Taapsi Pannu, KK Menon and Atul Kulkarni’s boxoffice numbers any day. The film had solid actors with zilch boxoffice track record yet it has hit the bull’s eye.

The reason is simple. There is a huge audience base in India which feeds itself on films like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers from Hollywood. This audience would want to know more about the wars our country has fought. 

The success of the film indicates that a good film will be watched, and it doesn’t need the impetus of an item song or a comedy track to make it work. 

For all we know there might be far more intriguing cat and mouse thrillers hidden inside the Indian wars.