-Nimish Inamdar (21st June 2004)
The year was 1999, when the whole of the nation was closely monitoring the northern part of India, as the Indian army faced the enemy bullets to conquer the lost land. The phase popularly known as the Kargil war, had shown its effect on every part of our country, and as everyone predicted we couldn’t just exclude our very own film industry from this impact.
Our film industry, popularly christened as the Bollywood, tries it’s best to project a love story in every possible background, and even army is not spared from it. In Bollywood movies focusing an Indian war, more than the conflict between the two forces, the conflict in the army mind between love for nation and love for wife, family, fiancée, or friends catches the center stage. This scenario is also repeated for the Kargil war. As expected, one of the great filmmakers, Mr.J.P.Dutta made a film L.O.C. and gave an unusual equation to the industry, that number of stars in a movie is inversely proportional to the success of the movie. Perhaps it was due to this that Farhan Akhtar learnt a lesson and made a film with lesser number of stars as compared to his first movie.
But that formula didn’t work effectively in Farhan’s new venture, Lakshya. Although he has made a good impressive movie, still it was well below his standards. Someone would have been expecting something still better from the writer and director of Dil Chahata Hai. It seems that Farhaan is now bending towards the mainstream cinema, which has the same regular masala.
The story starts with Karan (Hritik Roshan), a college going guy, without any goal, or obsession in life. The ball continuously revolves around Hritik, when he gets inspired to join the army by Romila (Priety Zinta), and his passion to become an army man changes his personality, and attitude to look through life. This breakthrough, gives him an opportunity to display his talents on the battlefield of point 5179 in the Kagil war.
Although Hritik has managed to outperform his previous performances, in the second half, he is not completely convincing in the first half of the movie. He seems to carry the same trait of his previous movie (Koi Mil Gaya) where he acts as a mentally retarded person. So either he has overacted his role, or else his character is not made clear in the movie, since he is certainly not a mentally retarded person in Lakshya. Preity has managed to get the Barkha Dutt approach, in her journalist’s character, Romila. To my surprise big B, playing Colonel Sunil Damle, doesn’t have much of footage in the film.
The presentation of the film is excellent. Especially the war scenes shot with great accuracy does bring the audience closer to reality. The effort taken in the side of Computer Graphics is all worth it, as the Helicopters hovering the Kargil sky, the hiking of Karan and his fellow mates, and many other sequences as a part of Operation Vijay monitored on the computer, have managed to give a real life tinge.
I remember a widow of a martyr on the Kargil field relating her husband’s death, to J.P.Dutta, as it was his movie Border, to encourage the soldier to join the army. Well what can I say about Lakshya is that it could just encourage still more people to sacrifice their lives on the battlefield for their motherland. The impact of Hindi films on the peoples’ mind, is sure to set new “Lakshya” for it’s ever wanting audiences.
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