Midnight’s Children Rating: 2.5/5

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MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN MOVIE REVIEW

Ratings:2.5/5  Review By: Rajeev Masand  Site: CNN IBN  (IBNLive)

Ambitious, but perhaps too much for its own good, the film struggles to incorporate the many subplots of Rushdies Booker Prize-winning novel. As a result the film feels overlong and exhausting, many of the characters come off underdeveloped, and the magic-realism element of the story fails to blend seamlessly with its political and cultural sweep. Midnights Children has an episodic TV serial feel to it, and hits speed-bumps when you get to the clunky magic realism portions. Yet the film is never unwatchable, although your interest does begin to wane after youve hit the 100-minute mark.Im going with two-and-a-half out of five for Deepa Mehtas Midnights Children. Despite the hiccups, its a film I recommend that you watch if you have an appetite for the unusual.

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Ratings:3/5  Review By: Anupama Chopra  Site: Star World ( Hindustan Times)

Deepa Mehta, working from a screenplay by Rushdie, struggles gallantly with the demands of the dense material. She delivers a film that, in equal measure, soars and sags. The fabulously inventive story smoothens the bumps in the screenplay but the narrative becomes truly wobbly when magical elements are introduced into the film. And yet, there are moments in Midnights Children that will fill you with emotion. Its a deeply flawed but deeply felt love letter to India. More than anything, the film made me want to revisit Rushdies iconic novel. Im going with three stars.

Ratings:3/5  Review By: Nishi Tiwari  Site: Rediff

Unlike the book, Mehta’s Midnight’s Children follows a linear narrative and makes for an engaging, tightly written first half. There are only two jarring characters in an otherwise good lineup of actors — Rahul Bose’s Zulfikar and Sathya Bhabha’s Saleem Sinai. The film’s second half succeeds in the sense that it makes us despair a bit — all the good things that the first half promises don’t really materialise in the second, much like the disillusioned Saleem and empty hopes of post-Independence era India. What you get for the bargain is a hauntingly melodious background score and magical shots of celebratory fireworks, moving snapshots from a war-ravaged Bangladesh and Saleem dancing to Aao twist karen with younger sister Jamila. Midnight’s Children is a must watch for people who’ve yearned to experience Salman Rushdie’s iconic storytelling in a more accessible format.

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Ratings:2.5/5  Review By: Shubhra Gupta Site: Indian Express

The film , whose screenplay has been written by Booker-winner author Rushdie himself, is not half as magical as the novel. It’s easy to see how hard it would be to condense a big fat door stopper of a tale into a two-and-a-half hour movie. If you are a fan of the novel, you might find too many gaps in the film; even otherwise, for those who haven’t either read the book, or are in love with it, it lags. The problem is in the writing : it leaches out the joyous, knowing quirkiness of the authorial voice, and makes it bland.Some of the film leaps off the screen, but only some. To match up to the book, the film needed more whimsy, more magic.

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Ratings:2.5/5  Review By: IANS  Site: NDTV

Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children is not a well-crafted film of Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name. Yet it captures the essence of the novel to the core. Even with Salman Rushdie’s narration and screenplay, what probably did not work for Midnight’s Children are the abrupt scenes. Each scene is brilliant, but in silos, disconnected with the next, making it difficult to capture and bring to life the essence of the book that combines a type of unexplained practicality.Yet this is a striking, well-produced and thoughtfully designed epic. Even with all its flaws, Midnight’s Children is worth a watch. If nothing else, go and watch Midnight’s Children to satiate your curiosity about this much-talked about novel.

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Ratings:1.5/5  Review By: Roshni Devi  Site: Koimoi

Whats Good: The cinematography; the music; some performances. Whats Bad: The lead actors performances; the befuddled screenplay that does no justice to the book; bad characterizations. Loo break: More so in the second half. Watch or Not?: Watch it only for the visual artistry; otherwise the magic is missing in this one.

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