Midnight's Children

A satisfactory (not great) adaptation of a Literary Masterpiece! This might be Deepa Mehta's most ambitious film till date, but not her best one.

The sets, the cinematography and the acting are superb; these are the main plus points for the movie. The author (Salman Rushdie) himself does the narration, which gives an intimate feel. The movie's splendid cast is truly fine; with so many experienced actors being a part of it. Shahana Goswami, Seema Biswas and Darsheel Safary truly stand out.

The movie could have been much better if a few things could have been avoided. First and the primary one being, she broke the first rule of novel adaptations - never let the original author adapt his own book. This causes the screenplay to be flabby, and sometimes overstretched. He struggles to incorporate most of his teeming subplots; the result is that it becomes too difficult to find a narrative focus.The editing and the background score could have been better. The characters seem a little underdeveloped and fail to make an emotional connection. And the screenplay fails to soulfully blend the supernatural realism with the historic political sweep of the story.

The Book might be 'Booker of Bookers', but the movie fails to reach that height. It's still a satisfactory watch for all the book's fans and lovers of unusual cinema.

An adaptation of Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel of the same name, 'Midnight's Children' is a passable film. Go in with limited expectations & your chances of being disappointed will be less.

'Midnight's Children' Synopsis: A pair of children, born within moments of India gaining independence from Britain, grow up in the country that is nothing like their parent's generation.

'Midnight's Children' is an engaging story on paper, but on celluloid, it appears clichéd. India-Pakistan conflict, is beaten to death in cinema. Sure, the novel must've been captivating, but on-screen, it looks very regular. Deepa Mehta's Direction is terrific. She makes this otherwise passable film, watchable, due to her true talent as a storyteller.

Performance-Wise: Satya Bhabha delivers a sincere performance. Shriya Saran has 2 standard expressions. Siddharth tries hard to look like a menace. Darsheel Safary is very good. Seema Biswas & Ronit Roy are excellent, as ever. Others lend support.

On the whole, 'Midnight's Children' is watchable, at best.

Salman Rushdie's epic novel was published in 1981 but it was not until 2003, when I was on a holiday in India, that I read this ambitious and challenging work. It has taken until 2013 - ironically the same year as the film version of another Booker Prize novel with an Indian theme, "The Life Of Pi" - to reach the big screen. One can understand why, because the span of Rushie's book is enormous - so many characters and so many events over a period of 60 years - and the style is so special - his own version of magical realism - that it was clearly a huge and complicated task.

But it largely works. Obviously the film has to be more accessible and the material more manageable, but the cinematography (it was shot in Sri Lanka) and the music (the original score is Nitin Sawhney) are wonderfully atmospheric additions to the story. Immense credit must go to Rushdie himself who wrote the screenplay (as well as acting as narrator), since it cannot have been easy to simplify his own long (460 pages) and rich text, but the result is a film that is immensely faithful to both the narrative and the tone of the novel. Director Deepa Mehta - another Indian now living abroad (Canada) - has crafted a grandiose tale that is as far from Bollywood as Hollywood which means that sadly it will not have a huge audience in any continent.

Clearly the film has been made with a lot of reverence for the novel and the nation, but it lacks pace and heart. The children of the title are those born in the first 24 hours of India's independence at midnight on 17 August 1947 and Rushdie's fantastical invention is to give these children different special powers. As a film, so many characters and so much history means that there are no real stand-out performances (indeed some of the acting is weak) and the real star of the movie is India itself - an exotic charmer who promised so much and has disappointed so much.

Only occasionally does a movie portray a culture in a time and place that truly succeeds in giving you a sense of what it was like there. I think of Like Water for Chocolate for example. I was totally blown away by this film's ability to somehow transport me back to India, capturing all the craziness, the colours, the confusion, the sensibilities.... I only spent six weeks there but my son who worked there for a year and a half agreed with me. I think that it is a very unusual film for western viewers. The symbolism is so important and rich. We are not watching individuals at all but characters who represent elements of the country that the writer and director are passionate about. The pace and length is absolutely essential to get the feel of how vast the story is. The camera-work is breathtaking, the music is absolutely authentic, I felt that I could even smell India again. I noticed that the reviews by western critics were mostly negative while those from India were the opposite. If you want to enjoy this film, leave your western film expectations at home and come with an openness to a different way of seeing, learning and experiencing. I will encourage everyone I know to treat themselves to this wonderful film.

Having read the novel a few years ago, went and watched it at the London Film Festival. As much as I wanted to love it, it didn't blow me away. The pluses: The acting was good with a good enough cast. Satya Bhabha, Rajat Kapoor, Shahana Goswami and some others (Seema Biswas, for example) were terrific. Shriya, Siddharth, Soha Ali Khan, the usual crowd that you see in many recent Hindi/Tamil films, did their best and I couldn't really find too much fault with them, though I've seen them play the same characters in other films. The story itself is quite powerful The locales were well chosen and you could sometimes feel the vibe of Partition. The minuses: The music (background score) was staid. The screenplay and adaptation to the medium seemed to be the crux of the problems, though. Deepa Mehta (and Rushdie himself) seemed to stick to the book too closely, and weren't very adventurous. At many times it was pure narration, which seems a bit lazy as an adaptation. The film was also 2.5 hours long meaning they left out nothing at the cost of making it a bit boring. Everything was so literal that they lost out on the magic of the writing. Still a normally good film it will typically be marked controversial even though it really isn't. I was just hoping for some distinctiveness and style.