‘Sitaare Zameen Par’ (2025) Movie Review - R.S. Prasanna's Underwhelming Remake

Javier Fesser's Champions/Campeones is one of those movies that could be made into a terrific Bollywood film. It has the right amount of drama that a talented Hindi filmmaker can turn into a heart-warming melodrama. After watching that Spanish comedy-drama, all I could fantasize about was how better the material would look in the hands of a Bollywood filmmaker. Champions has a big heart and big emotions - it almost cries out for a Grand Indian Adaptation. Then again, I might have overestimated our filmmakers. It's not that they are not talented. The problem is that everybody nowadays is busy pleasing and predicting the taste of an audience that doesn't demand much from movies or moviemakers. This is why a Reema Kagti makes Superboys of Malegaon, and a Vikramaditya Motwane gives us CTRL and Black Warrant. In other words, filmmakers who once inspired us with their greatness now try to tone down their work so that their movies or TV shows can be easily digested by the mass audience. Only Anurag Kashyap has not yet yielded to the demands of content consumers—and he paid the price with Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat, which was a victim of both obtuse reviews and poor box office performance. 

Before Sitaare Zameen Par, R.S. Prasanna directed Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, a remake of his own Tamil film, Kalyana Samayal Saadham. I have not seen the 2013 film, but based on his remakes, one can label him as a funny, kind-hearted filmmaker. Even in interviews, one can notice a glow on his face. He seems content. Prasanna has said that he is very patient and that he makes a movie only if he trusts in the material. There are long gaps in his short filmography, and after watching Sitaare Zameen Par, one wishes that he had taken a longer break before fully committing to this project. The main problem with SZP is that it seems to have been conceived with moral lessons. In Champions, Fesser first saw his characters and their motivations before normalizing or spreading awareness about intellectually disabled individuals. SZP, written by Divy Nidhi Sharma, first teaches and then tries to go near its characters. Hence, you get a scene where Gulshan (Aamir Khan) asks direct questions regarding intellectual disabilities, and Kartar Paaji (Gurpal Singh) answers like a scripted mouthpiece in a government-sponsored advertisement. You can almost see the filmmakers writing all the relevant data on a whiteboard. Was this PSA-like quality present from the beginning or added later after Khan's involvement? Champions doesn't make blatant attempts at educating the audience - the process is more organic there. Here, one feels as if Prasanna and his team are bound by some moral obligation to send us away with pamphlets. This means they repeatedly emphasize simple points, which is why a line related to "normal behavior" pops up frequently, both as a joke and a reminder.

Speaking of jokes, Gulshan asks Satbir (Aroush Datta) to use the word "businesswoman" instead of "prostitute." Five seconds later, someone asks Gulshan what his wife does, and he replies that she's a businesswoman. When Kartar, after explaining that everybody has their own normal, asks Gulshan how much sugar he wants, the new coach says, "Normal." This allows Satbir to mischievously inquire, "Aapka normal ya mera?" What this indicates about SZP is that it's in a hurry to prove how witty it is; the setups are immediately followed by the payoffs. The movie asks for a pat on the back, but it unintentionally exposes itself as something that goes for easy humor. When Gulshan orders his team to grab the balls, they...let's just say they don't grab the basketball. Ribald humor can be its own reward. In Champions, one of the players develops a crush on Athenea Mata's character (he stares at her bosom). SZP, sadly, doesn't really commit to this line of amusement. It even sanitizes that "crush angle." This itself is not a matter of grave concern, but the issue lies in the tweaks SZP does to the original jokes: It renders the unpredictable predictable. Consider the scene in Champions where Marco encounters his mother in a hotel. He comes out of his room, locks the door, and we see a hazy figure in the background. This out-of-focus character is revealed to be the mother, and it comes as a genuine surprise, eliciting laughter. In SZP, Gulshan stands near the elevator on the left side of the screen, and the right side is left empty for the mother's appearance. The scene is conventionally planned, so the outcome feels predictable. There is no room for surprises here. 

In the name of performance, Khan's face alternates between a smile and a scowl. He often scratches his head in embarrassment, like a child who has been caught masturbating by his parents. The point, of course, is to show his character as a naive kid who is forced to confront his weakness, but Khan is so fussy that it seems as if the actor is simply proving why he's called Mr. Perfectionist by his fans, journalists, and other filmmakers. In one scene, Sunita (Genelia Deshmukh), Gulshan's wife, complains that Gulshan has a bad habit of not taking other viewpoints into consideration. The same criticism can be extended to the film itself. SZP is locked into Gulshan's perspective; other characters exist to just wake him up. Sunita apparently wanted to be an actor. She gave up on her career after getting married to Gulshan. But he never asked her to sacrifice her professional life. Moreover, many actors continue to work after marriage and often find great success. Some actors take a break from movies when they get pregnant. Sunita didn't even have to face this problem, given Gulshan has no interest in becoming a father. It's she who forces him to become a dad. In other words, she seems responsible for killing her own dreams, her own career. SZP never counters this notion because Sunita is never allowed to discuss her motives or experiences. This could have been a fantastic opportunity for Deshmukh to take cues from her personal insights and incidents to give her character more dimensions (she's married in real life and could have drawn from her experiences to tell us why exactly a married woman would find it challenging to work in films even when the husband has no problem with her profession). However, Prasanna is so enamored of the man—the superstar—at the center that he either fails to see this opportunity or has no idea he could have fused reality with fiction. 

SZP treats intellectually disabled characters as mere stepping stones who elevate and expand Gulshan's consciousness and intelligence. One of them lives with his roommates, but we don't see what activities he does with them or what both parties have learned from each other. Lotus (Aayush Bhansali) has a girlfriend, yet we never see them engaged in conversation or hanging out together. The "sitaare" are left blank (an issue the remake borrows from the original), but they are also the sole reason to go to the movie theater. What's more, Prasanna dips SZP in plenty of sugar. It's a sweet film and very watchable, though the sweetness turns you off just before the interval when a frog re-enters the frame and dances along with the characters. The moment looks so artificial that it throws you off balance. There are too many "tingu" jokes, and they are not funny even once. At one point, SZP shifts from genetic faults to an old couple romance. The filmmakers might have been thinking, "Hey, why stop at one topic when you can educate the audience about another thing as well." In some shared cinematic universe, Gautam and Raman (from Stolen) could be congratulating Gulshan (and vice versa). Again, things could have been better if SZP had ever taken into account Preeto's (Dolly Ahluwalia) point of view. What does she like about Daulat ji (Brijendra Kala)? What do they talk about in private, away from Gulshan's ears? Before Preeto leaves for an "ashram," Gulshan unexpectedly gives her a hug. Does she discuss this incident with her lover? Prasanna's silence accentuates his almost slavish devotion to the source material. Like the film, he is filled with sweetness. The crucial elements that are missing from both the film and the filmmaker are an ardent curiosity and fervid imagination. 

Champions is currently not available to stream on any platform in India. That's a pity because it makes for an essential viewing, especially when placed alongside Prasanna's effort. Watch Fesser's sports comedy before or after SZP, and you will realize how far Bollywood has fallen in an area where it once was a...champion. Fesser does everything better. The climax of both films is almost the same; yet, the spirit - the message - of that ending comes to the foreground more powerfully in the original. Here, all the heavy underlining works against the material's strength. What's (inadvertently) funny is that even after highlighting each line, each pause, each expression, Gulshan is required to sum up whatever he has learned and how he has changed during the final moments (in Champions, we grasp all this information, which Fesser doesn't spoon-feed the audience). I guess the main reason why SZP didn't work for me very well is that Prasanna overly dramatizes a story that's already packed with a sufficient amount of emotions. I like remakes that bring something new to the table. However, the changes implemented here prove detrimental to the overall experience. It would have been nice if Prasanna had just copied Champions frame by frame.  

Final Score- [4.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times