Jeff's Reviews

Thoughts on every movie I've ever seen.

Rocketry: The Nambi Effect (2022)

Directed by Madhavan

Starring Madhavan, Simran, Rajit Kapoor

Author

Madhavan seems like an interesting guy. He goes by one name, he seems to be a big star in India, and he wrote, directed, and starred in this film. He’s done some work to look like the real Nambi, so props for that. But why are rockets so important to Nambi and to India? This is the plot point which holds the entire movie together, and without strongly establishing the motivations for the main character and the story, the movie is nothing.

Performances all around are awful. D-grade actors play very boring characters who try to be cool and want to be proper contributors to society. There are no truly interesting, edgy, or funny characters, they are all formulaic and boring. And who knew rocket science has so many attractive women?

Horribly scripted dialogue fills every scene without any pauses or dramatic silences. Why does the dialogue keep jumping in and out of English? Is this how people really talk in India?

Cross-cutting with a Nambi interview to narrate the missing plot points is cheap. A more cleanly told story wouldn’t require these melodramatic interruptions at all. And if Nambi was such a revered public figure, why do the interviewer and entire TV crew break down in tears as if they’re just hearing this story for the first time? This is the Forrest Gump problem, where no one sitting next to Gump on the bench knew who he was despite the fact that he was clearly a widely known American hero.

Weird splicing in of the real Nambi at the end of the interview. It’s jarring, and it takes you out of the movie. It also makes it seem like the real Nambi is a little narcissistic, which I’m sure was not the aim of this movie.

Camerawork is amateurish, starting with what is supposed to be an impressive tracking shot from space that quickly turns into a wobbly mess. Effects are very mediocre.

The overwhelmingly positive film reviews seem to come exclusively from Indian critics. Very curious to know what Western critics thought of this.

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