Well, people do get inspired by someone else’s work. Works, that are classics, are meant to inspire others and the greatness of such works lies in it. There’s nothing wrong in being inspired. But there should be a difference between being inspired and copying. And Bollywood has never failed in proving us the same. Our directors and script writers get inspired by others to such an extent that eventually they end up in copying them frame by frame. The only thing that they are good at is inserting songs in regular intervals. And of course, they never acknowledge.
Okay, at this point you may be wondering what had got into me, why am my blabbering? The answer to your question is that recently I encountered one more such act of inspiration. Only this time, the encounter was accidental.
Last weekend I watched The Ghazi Attack. I chose it over Raees and Rangoon. And to be honest it didn’t disappoint me. With a strong cast that includes faces like Kay Kay Menon and Atul Kulkarni and a sound set in comparison to Bollywood standards, the film was quite entertaining. Especially the underwater drama during the second half was quite gripping. A real good job done by the makers. Overall a commendable piece.
Till here everything was okay, then the accident occurred. My whole impression about Ghazi got subsided when I watched U-571 today. It is a fictional story of a group of American Navy man who boarded a German submarine in order to steal the top secret Nazi Enigma machine (Something striking 😉 ). Well, Ghazi seemed to be a ditto copy of this movie. We can accept some similarities between two movies of the same genre as mere co-incidence but here, we’ve got a whole list of co incidences. The list goes as follows:
- The starting sequences of U-571 in which the Allied S-Boat is shown anchored by the port, about to set sail with everyone busy preparing it for the operation (which is a classified one), a panning shot of the submarine with close ups of sprinters rising from welding are quite similar to the starting sequences of Ghazi, where the Indian submarine S-21 is shown being prepared for a classified operation.
- (Spoiler) In both the films a sailor is shown demonstrating the force of water pressure on the submarine when it goes beyond its stipulated depth in front of his teammates by using an egg. ( A hell of a co-incidence)
- (Spoiler) In Ghazi after Kay Kay Menon’s death Arjun Varma, who is a junior officer, takes over the charge of the ship. A sailor is then seen approaching the ship’s Executive officer Atul Kulkarni and expressing his displeasure over the issue but in turn gets rebuked by him. Both the incidents of taking over the ship’s command by a junior officer and a crew member complaining in front of the ship’s chief officer seems to be a ditto copy from the U-571 wherein also you’ll find the same story.
- (Spoiler)In U-571 a crew member’s dead body is shown flushed out of a torpedo tube. In Ghazi the body of Kay Kay is flushed out in the same manner.
- In fact both the films were named after the enemy vessels, the Pakistani sub Ghazi and Nazi U-Boat U-571. (Well this might truly be a co-incidence but I fail to think so).
Ghazi can no doubt be considered as a wonderful movie packed with some powerful performances, also a first of its kind in Bollywood. But maintaining the originality could have made it much much better. It’s an irony that even after having such a wonderful historical plot the makers failed in consummating a great story. They were so busy in copying their sequences from Hollywood that they didn’t seem to have much time left for it.
Thoughts, thoughts and thoughts............... 