The forgotten Army

With The Forgotten Army — the new five-part Amazon Prime Video miniseries that follows the Subhash Chandra Bose-led Indian National Army — creator and director Kabir Khan (Bajrangi Bhaijaan) wants to shed light on what he thinks is an overlooked chapter of our history. This isn't the first time he's tackling the story, having directed a staid six-part eponymous docu-series in 1999, which has aged poorly. Khan has been trying to revisit the topic ever since and his dream has finally come true, over two decades later. And with decades of experience and the financial might of Amazon behind him, The Forgotten Army promises a grand look at the INA, from their valiant efforts to the horrors they faced. Sort of like a South-East Asia extension to the terrific HBO miniseries The Pacific.

Unfortunately, Khan is too set in his Bollywood ways to deliver anything remotely close to an honest, grounded, and vivid account of the INA's Burma campaign, like The Pacific did for US Marines' Pacific theatre. The Forgotten Army — written by Khan along with husband-wife duo Heeraz Marfatia (Aazaan) and Shubhra Swarup (Wazir) — is driven by a need to make its protagonists come across as the hero, no matter how unconvincing it gets. But the much more egregious error is the constant reliance on a background song, which is sent in to rouse things up whenever the Amazon series is lacking in fervour. (Its combination with characters walking in slow motion is even worse.) The song is used so often that we felt like tuning off The Forgotten Army every time it was played.

To make matters all the more annoying, Khan & Co. also fall prey to Bollywood's love for grandstanding. At various points during The Forgotten Army — sometimes laughably in the middle of a battle — the good guys will launch into a mini-monologue to talk about their heart-breaking, righteous, and powerful backstories, value systems, and capabilities. This is the poorest kind of message filmmaking. Don't turn your characters into loudspeakers and don't lecture the audience. No one enjoys being talked down to. People can think for themselves and should be treated as such, not like a dumb flock of sheep. Simply give us a look at what happened — remember the old filmmaking adage: show, not tell — and trust the viewers to deduce the rest on their own.