Mission Mangal

A launch fails and the blame falls on Rakesh Dhawan. As a punishment he is put on the Mars project; nobody believes it will happen. Tara Shinde brings him an idea: use less fuel and lift the craft out of Earth's pull in stages. A team is assembled and none of them is willing; everyone is waiting for a transfer. The budget is small, the time short and the parts cannot be found. What the women engineers carry at home is inside the narrative too. If the launch window is missed the next one is two years away. Jagan Shakti directs. Vidya Balan plays Tara and Akshay Kumar plays Rakesh; Taapsee Pannu and Nithya Menen are in the cast. The language is Hindi. Its ground is real; India's Mars orbiter mission launched in 2013 and reached orbit on the first attempt. The mission's budget was very low compared with its international equivalents and the film keeps returning to that. The narrative explains the science through comparisons with cooking, which is both its clearest and its most argued over choice. The film brings the women scientists forward; the visibility of women engineers on the real mission had been discussed too. The narrative carries a nationalist register and that becomes plain in the last section. The fictional characters do not correspond one to one with real people. The film did well at the box office. Its limit is method; the narrative is simplified, the emotional steering high, and the ending a celebration. Who it is for: viewers who like Indian cinema and narratives of space missions. Who it is not for: it is simplified, argumentative, and the ending where expected.