Amaran is a well-produced actioner with typical family emotions of a man in the army.
There are no new stories, there are only the ways of telling the old stories. That is what film making has become eventually. I don’t think the worst thing that can happen to any industry. Retelling is the inherent quality of any type of storytelling. Amaran is a retelling of Mukund Varadarajan’s life story in a format that has already become a standard template to tell the tales of martyrs.
Siva Karthikeyan plays the role of Major Mukund Varadarajan, who ups the ladder slowly to become the major at Rashtriya Rifles– a counter-insurgency force especially formed for Jammu & Kashmir. The story of Mukund begins and ends as you expect. There is an eternally loving wife, Indhu Rebecca Varghese (Sai Pallavi), there is a traditional passive-progressive mother who is concerned about her only son enrolling in the Indian Army. There is a father who encourages his son to be in the army. There is also Indhu’s father– who is also passive-progressive– who doesn’t want her daughter to get married to an army-man. And, there is also Pakistan, the obvious enemy of India.
Nationalism is a very sensitive emotion in India. The theme of nationalism has its loyal audience. When Rajkumar Periasamy is trying to tell the story of an army-man, what is the new string of thread that he is following? The familial emotions mentioned above and too many guns firing at the enemy and the bleeding, yet fearless protagonists are quite common visuals that you get once you close your eyes and try to structure a story around an army-man. All these were already seen in Adivi Shesh’s Major which was also a biopic of Sandeep Unnikrishnan– the martyr of 2008’s 9/11 Mumbai Blasts. Amaran neither gives you anything new, except the phenomenal performance from Sai Pallavi.
Sai Pallavi as Mukund’s wife is incredible. Whenever she is in frame there is a sense of illumination. She has the child-like excitement and caricatured as the great Indian wife who only wishes to have nothing but what her husband wishes. Rahul Bose as Col. Amit Singh Dabas has a very minor role, nothing much to offer. Nonetheless, a good addition.
The production quality done by Raaj Kamal Films International (RKFI) and Sony International Productions is really good. The choice of shooting in the real locations gives a more authentic in-the-action feeling, especially when the real-life events of stone pelting and protests are infused with the fictionalised scenes written for the movie. Amaran would have more impact if the focus was on the war-drama, instead of war-action. Amaran is a lost opportunity to explore the intricacies of Jammu and Kashmir’s politics. However, Rajkumar Periasamy has tried. You see the characters resembling Maulana Azad and organisations like Jaish E Mohammad. But, it merely scratches over the surface, neither it goes deep, nor it flys-off.
Amaran is a well-produced actioner with typical family emotions of a man in the army. Amaran stays true to Indian Nationalism and paying tributes to martyrs, but it loses the essentials of storytelling, –(or should i call it re-storytelling?)– which makes it even more predictable.
TeluguFunda Rating: 2/5
