Sanjay Kumar

Although most parts of the movie is fiction, it still left me mesmerising and I ended up binge watching it for half a month. Well, it shows Mangal Pandey (Aamir Khan) in much more heroic form what he actually was (as far history is concerned). The other 3 lead characters in the movie were- Captain William Gordon (Toby Stephens), Jwala (Ameesha Patel) and Heera (Rani Mukherjee) - all of them are fictional. Captain Gordon is kinda shown as a British soldier who’s friends with Pandey, having saved his life in war. In reality, Mangal Pandey had actually not taken part in that war (watch the movie to find out cause no SPOILERS) cause at that time the war took place, Pandey was basically a child and as we know, kids are not recruited. The film also depicts serious social issues in the form of portraying Jwala and Heera who are Gordon and Pandey’s love interest respectively. Jwala’s part I still consider but I don’t like that Heera was shown as Pandey’s love interest, well kinda fine with rest of her depiction though. Also the movie depicts Pandey to be meeting high rank sepoys like Bakht Khan or meeting Tatya Tope, which I find very unusual cause he was an ordinary rank sepoy. There was also depiction that Pandey was aware of western concepts and democracy which is kinda far thought of for an ordinary person in those years (doesn’t matter whether they work for the English East India Company or not). There was also inaccurate depiction of the terrain of Barrackpore, where at some point there was shown hills and also semi-arid regions which is not true for Barrackpore at all, which is in a plain, fertile land. The song ‘Rasiya’ would legit give you goosebumps. But overall, it was more kinda of a BOLLYWOOD MASALA movie than ballad or biographical movie, but still it is worth watching.