Review | Mission Mangal film review: more workplace soap opera than space drama, this is no Bollywood take on The Martian
- Director Jagan Shakti’s Bollywood film dramatises the launch of the 2013 unmanned Mars Orbiter Mission space probe
- The film’s tech talk is laughable, but it does a good job of shining a spotlight on the obstacles young women scientists face
2/5 stars
Created in August 1969, just weeks after the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019. To mark the occasion, Jagan Shakti’s film Mission Mangal dramatises one of the ISRO’s most ambitious programmes to date: the launch of the unmanned Mars Orbiter Mission space probe, in 2013.
Success would make India the first Asian nation to reach Mars on its maiden attempt, but failure would exacerbate the mockery from Nasa and the rest of the space exploration community.
Audiences anticipating a Bollywood spin on Ridley Scott’s The Martian , or an ambitious space adventure in the vein of Frant Gwo’s The Wandering Earth , may do better to abort their movie-going mission before take-off.
Shakti’s film takes a far more grounded approach, following project director Rakesh Dhawan (Akshay Kumar) as he battles for a bigger budget, more experienced staff, and cosier office facilities. This is less a story of harnessing technology and researching deep space than it is a workplace soap opera, as Dhawan and his team juggle their demanding ISRO commitments with a variety of domestic dramas.
The film’s tech talk is dumbed down to a laughable degree, with metaphors ranging from cooking to cricket supplanting anything approaching actual rocket science.