The Revolutionaries, directed by Nikkhil Advani, might have been released on an OTT platform (Prime Video), but it's surely driven by the desire to be something like a crowd-pleasing, (multi)star-driven, big-screen spectacle drama. It's just that the kind of "star-driven" movies it aims to ape through its eight-episode format are precisely the kinds of films you wish had never existed on Earth. Think of those commercial vehicles where a festival song opens with heroes entering the frame in slow motion, or where the heroes sing (for the camera) while preparing a grand plan in unison, or where emotional cues, through emotional music/scores, are hammered inside your skull, and you will have a pretty fair picture of what's in store here. But then, maybe such movies can be somewhat pleasurable if you are in sync with their mood, their characters, their goals. So maybe, then, the fault lies in the show itself, given that you need to gigantically screw up in order to fail at having viewers connect with brave freedom fighters.
But then, Advani takes Sanjeev Sanyal's book, Revolutionaries: The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom (which I have not read), and does gigantically screw up. Watching The Revolutionaries, I once again, for the millionth time, kept asking myself, "Have filmmakers really forgotten how to decently shoot a scene, let alone make a full-length decent show or movie?" The aesthetics of these productions are so, so, so amateurish that you do wonder if humans were actually involved in the filmmaking process or if everything had been generated through basic prompts fed to AI. And there are many, many scenes in The Revolutionaries that appear to be strictly, purely generated through AI, be it a shot of characters riding through a forest on their horses or some visual backdrops that look both chintzy and polished. The advancement of technology in cinema should have ideally encouraged filmmakers to take bolder leaps—to go where it was impossible to go a few years or decades ago—to prove how powerful, inventive, and exciting this medium can be.
Unfortunately, if you hand an expensive iPhone to a monkey, he will only use it as a stick. The monkey won't surf the Internet to sharpen his intellect or open ChatGPT to better understand the mechanics of rocket science in a language convenient to him. Most directors nowadays have turned into "monkeys." They have devolved so terribly that it's too much to expect them to be competent with their basics. The result, unsurprisingly, is shows like The Revolutionaries, where an important, relevant topic acts as a substitute for artistic ambition and creativity. What's shocking is the absence of a tone, an atmosphere, a feeling. Impersonality, in these cases, becomes the default mode of "filmmaking." All the effort seemingly goes into the literal-minded translation of script to screen. The emotionally unvarying images merely depict what's written on the pages without any hint of drama or beauty. The director might as well have turned the camera towards the script. The actors, meanwhile, might simply have allowed themselves to be recorded during rehearsals or table reads, with their voices then inserted in the background and played in sync with the page on the screen.
The blandness of the images is reflected in the bland performances, which feel like the products of desperate exertions and wasted energies. The actors seem to have given their all to the series, but Advani uses them narrowly. They pose more and perform less, though only because Advani's idea of a freedom fighter is pretty unremarkable and thin. As far as the director is concerned, what makes freedom fighters passionate and alluring is the moody posture and the theatrical voice with which they utter slogans like "Bharat Mata Ki Jai," "Vande Mataram," or "Jai Bhawani." Rash Behari Bose (Bhuvan Bam) is frustrated, Sachindranath Sanyal (Rohit Saraf) acts cute, Pratibha Lahiri (Pratibha Ranta) is sometimes shy and sometimes perky, and Bagha Jatin (Gurfateh Pirzada) is the tough-looking guy. The characters don't quite deviate from these one-note expressions that come to define their whole personality, but even when they do, they merely end up falling into a one-note rage mode that feels more rehearsed than organic.
I think most of the blame goes to Advani for failing to direct his actors properly. It's probably because of his ineptness that I ended up wondering whether Saraf's Sachin is a male chauvinist, considering how pissed he looks whenever Pratibha does something smart and wins the approval of other men, like Rash and Bagha, whom Sachin sees as his role models. I thought he was getting jealous of Pratibha for receiving more recognition than him, rather than feeling what Advani actually intended: that Sachin is just being protective.
A freedom fighter like Bhagat Singh continues to be a great source of inspiration for many not only because he gave up his life for the country but also because his pointed philosophy, rational thinking, and political clarity combine to paint an intriguing, inspiring hero who was spiritually sharp and intellectually alive. Bhagat Singh had a remarkably rich history, which is also true of other great freedom fighters, because the real insight into their character emerges from their background and lifestyle, which tell you about their evolution from common men to fearless fighters worth writing about in the pages of history. This background, this history, is precisely what's missing from The Revolutionaries.
Advani doesn't bother diving into the lives of his freedom fighters to lend them interesting dimensions and a tangible sense of humanity. His revolutionaries, in fact, come with prepackaged notions of patriotism and moral justice that are so tightly plot-centric that they might as well have been programmed into them by feeding them the script. They aren't characters who happen to be revolutionaries; they are revolutionaries first and characters almost incidentally. Their patriotism is not something that emerges from their lives, experiences, contradictions, or personalities. It is simply there because the plot requires it to be there. That's it.
I thought that in terms of clumsiness and amateur-hour drama, nothing would be able to top Batwara 1947 this year, but Advani clearly wants to beat Rajkumar Santoshi in this department. Well, congratulations for making a period action thriller that does its best to put you in a comatose state. The real battle you engage in while watching the series is the one where you fight to keep your eyes open. The Revolutionaries is a bad form of anesthesia, however, because all that sleepiness doesn't allow you to laugh at its badness.
And anyway, why is it even named The Revolutionaries? I don't think it deserves the title. If someone had asked me for a name after making me sit through all eight episodes together, The Rubbish is what I would have suggested. Believe it or not, this title is actually more appropriate.
Final Score - [1/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times