Even as I am writing this, I can just imagine self proclaimed intellectuals salivating over the thought of ripping this comment to shreds. Well, to all you wonderfully smart people, I hope this comment gives you ample opportunity for this kind of mental masturbation.
To start off, YES, I HAVE SEEN OLDBOY. So I know that for all its disturbing thematic elements (incest, torture, mutilation, to name a few), it is a brilliant, visceral film that leaves you staring at the screen for a good 10 minutes after the credits have rolled. But to compare a Bollywood film like Zinda to a work of art like Oldboy is like comparing a 4 year old kid's essay to Shakespeare. There is no way Sanjay Gupta could have matched up to the original, given not just the fact that he just isn't as good as Chan Wook Park, but also that quite a few of the film's themes cannot be digested by the Indian audience. Context! Context, people! On its own, when not submitted to comparative scrutiny (oh I can see you film buffs getting worked up now!), the film is, from a technical perspective, quite a polished product. Acting is just fine, and quite realistic, though the supporting characters, especially Mahesh Manjrekar and Lara Dutta, make the ride a bit bumpy. Technically, the film is brilliant (again, I'm treating this as a stand alone product), and I personally enjoyed the one shot corridor scene equally in both movies (guilty of comparison here). What really lets the film down is the writing. After building up the audience's curiosity, the film completely blows it when it comes to revealing John Abraham's motives for doing what he does. The flashback is handled in a very ham-handed fashion, the motive, when revealed, just doesn't seem convincing enough, and we seriously need good child actors! The writing fails again when we get to the end, where it seems like the writers just looked at their watches and decided that it was time the movie ended.
In essence, yes, the film is a complete ripoff of Oldboy, and the nothing, not the acting, not the direction, nothing at all, matches up to Oldboy, but if you must have a bad analogy, think of this as something similar to what 'The Departed' did to 'Infernal Affairs' (and if anyone thought Departed was a good film, make sure you never run into me or I will morph into a finger wielding, hateful comment writing SOB sooner than you can say 'plagiaristic, over-hyped crap'!) Coming back to the point, Zinda exposes the common Indian audience to a kind of cinema that they have never seen before. It's like 'art cinema for dummies', and we need it. So all you smug self-proclaimed cinema PhDs out there, stop the madness and get some perspective!
To start off, YES, I HAVE SEEN OLDBOY. So I know that for all its disturbing thematic elements (incest, torture, mutilation, to name a few), it is a brilliant, visceral film that leaves you staring at the screen for a good 10 minutes after the credits have rolled. But to compare a Bollywood film like Zinda to a work of art like Oldboy is like comparing a 4 year old kid's essay to Shakespeare. There is no way Sanjay Gupta could have matched up to the original, given not just the fact that he just isn't as good as Chan Wook Park, but also that quite a few of the film's themes cannot be digested by the Indian audience. Context! Context, people! On its own, when not submitted to comparative scrutiny (oh I can see you film buffs getting worked up now!), the film is, from a technical perspective, quite a polished product. Acting is just fine, and quite realistic, though the supporting characters, especially Mahesh Manjrekar and Lara Dutta, make the ride a bit bumpy. Technically, the film is brilliant (again, I'm treating this as a stand alone product), and I personally enjoyed the one shot corridor scene equally in both movies (guilty of comparison here). What really lets the film down is the writing. After building up the audience's curiosity, the film completely blows it when it comes to revealing John Abraham's motives for doing what he does. The flashback is handled in a very ham-handed fashion, the motive, when revealed, just doesn't seem convincing enough, and we seriously need good child actors! The writing fails again when we get to the end, where it seems like the writers just looked at their watches and decided that it was time the movie ended.
In essence, yes, the film is a complete ripoff of Oldboy, and the nothing, not the acting, not the direction, nothing at all, matches up to Oldboy, but if you must have a bad analogy, think of this as something similar to what 'The Departed' did to 'Infernal Affairs' (and if anyone thought Departed was a good film, make sure you never run into me or I will morph into a finger wielding, hateful comment writing SOB sooner than you can say 'plagiaristic, over-hyped crap'!) Coming back to the point, Zinda exposes the common Indian audience to a kind of cinema that they have never seen before. It's like 'art cinema for dummies', and we need it. So all you smug self-proclaimed cinema PhDs out there, stop the madness and get some perspective!