MAJOR Movie Review - Salute to one of India's Greatest Heroes
Since first seeing the late 26/11 hero Major sandeep Unnikrishnan's passport data-size photo on a news station in san francisco in 2008, actor-filmmaker adivi sesh has been captivated by his heroism and tale. Since then, Adivi has been a sandeep fan, collecting every news clipping he could find on the braveheart. And the public's adoration for the real-life hero resulted in the production of Major, a three-hour action drama.
26/11 is not like the battles that rage on the outskirts of our country, where the ground conditions are beyond our comprehension. It was a fight that occurred in the very core of our country. It had effectively turned mumbai into a battleground. The NSG (National Security Guard) of india was called in to spearhead the urban battle. sandeep and his assassins were stranded on an exotic planet. They had no idea where the terrorists were. What is the number of terrorists in the building? What is their strategy? All they knew was that they had a responsibility to protect the country from an unknown attack.
When Major sandeep Unnikrishnan died fighting terrorists at the Taj Hotel in 2008, he was only 31 years old. Sandeep's last-minute decisions and how he single-handedly charged at the terrorists, driving them into a corner and effecting a breakthrough in a deadly siege that had shaken the indian security forces are chronicled in a chapter in the book Black Tornado: The Three Sieges of mumbai 26/11. He lost his life in the process, making him the first NSG leader to die in combat.
Major was not a documentary about his death. It was, however, a chronicle of his colourful life. adivi sesh gets the majority of things right. Major is not a realistic war film. It's a long way from being realistic. Instead, Adivi, who also wrote the film, injects a liberal amount of traditional romanticism that is typical of indian films. The film's themes are cliched. The familiar themes are woven into a non-linear tale by director Sashi kiran Tikka and editors Vinay Kumar Sirigineedi and Kodati Pavan Kalyan.
Major is a highly personal story. Adivi has exercised a great deal of artistic licence in tracing Sandeep's development from a lovely and nice young man to an exceptional soldier. If you simply concentrate on the emotional aspect of the picture, it might just work for you. Sandeep's training montage appears to be staged in an insufficient manner, since it fails to convey the indian army's colossal power structure. The boot camp sequences would have benefited from more research and production value. Instead, we get a sparsely constructed training camp in which our hero never runs out of breath, never sweats, never has untidy hair, and never loses his radiance.