'Rocketry: The Nambi Effect' review: Superhero, scientist, patriot

'Rocketry: The Nambi Effect' suffers from a serious lack of narrative fire and wit.

This is the first time actor R. Madhavan has written, directed and played the lead role in a film—very few actors have withstood such a burden and excelled.

Madhavan’s job is harder perhaps also because it is the biopic of a scientist whose complicated legacy as an ISRO trailblazer still has some unresolved concerns—for example, who implicated him as a Pakistan-sympathizer and subjected him to cruelty, discrimination and humiliation before the Supreme Court acquitted him?

Madhavan’s attempt to glorify Narayanan as a man resolute in his passion to galvanise India’s potential for space exploration and rocket engineering has no layers or ambiguities. It is an effusive biopic, big on patriotism and melodrama, and painfully short on storytelling sophistication. 

Rocketry: The Nambi Effect begins with Narayanan joining ISRO. His colleagues are Vikram Sarabhai (Rajit Kapoor) and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (Gulshan Grover) and they are in pursuit of finding liquid fuel alternative for rockets. The search takes Nambi Narayanan to Princeton where he convinces an expert on liquid fuel by becoming his domestic help. He goes to France and Russia, and barely manages to ship cutting-edge cryogenic equipment from Russia without America discovering the deal between India and Russia, and getting them to India via Karachi to escape American scrutiny. It’s the 1980s and relationship between India and the USSR is at its most bonhomous. Back home, Narayanan becomes a victim of police brutality, and a social outcast along with his family—wife Meena (Simran), and daughter and son. He is accused of being a Pakistan-sympathiser and anti-national. Meena suffers from trauma-related breakdowns, Narayanan’s entire life falls apart, until an CBI investigation gets him out of police custody and later the Supreme Court acquits him. Nobody was found to be guilty of falsely implicating him. The story intercuts with a television interview with an aged Nambi Narayanan about his life which Shah Rukh Khan hosts as himself—Khan sharp and precise as the interviewer until the last moments of the film when the melodrama reaches a level difficult to digest. 

The arc of the protagonist’s journey, in itself, is staggering. A scientist with enough conviction and bravado to imagine big things for his country’s future in space science. But in the script, which Madhavan co-writes with Sukhmani Sadana, along with several other additional writing credits, is so focssed on the thumping chest nationalism of the story that the character at its centre becomes paper-thin—a well-intentioned, wronged man. Indianness is an amalgamation of the worst clichés known to the world—devoted, hardworking, even “good at housework”. Narayanan diverts female attention in Europe and Russia with awkwardly-delivered lines such as “Indian men make their women smile.” At this point, my patience with the film’s dialogues had worn thin—a boredom had replaced the unintentional humour the dialogues triggered. The character of Narayanan has no transformation or journey after having experienced life in different countries. Nambi is earnest and wronged with that great Indian middle-class virtue of being “simple”. In Madhavan’s hands, “simplistic” defines the character better. 

As an actor too, Madhavan has a hurriedness and indifference that shows even in the most dramatic scenes. There is no intensity, surprise or sparkle in his portrayal of a character he feels passionate about. The film is suffused with a dissipated energy all too obvious in the lead performance.

With a linear, uninspired structure intercutting the interview, Rocketry: The Nambi Effect suffers from serious lack of narrative fire and wit. Most scenes are insipid, and technically, too, the film has nothing spectacular. 

Despite Madhavan’s best intentions—he has said in interviews that this has been a passion project for him—Rocketry: The Nambi Effect is a tedious project. The science is far too descriptive, mostly in jargon, and towards the end, the glorification of the man at the centre as well as the Modi government which, Madhavan suggests, finally recognised Narayanan’s worth by awarding him, is a mammoth effort without heft, charm or creative ambition.