Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie himself wrote the script for this adaptation of his prize-winning novel about a group of Indian children with superpowers whose lives interweave with the history of the subcontinent in the decades after independence. And that is the main problem. It's as if Rushdie, who also executive-produced, has tried to pack too much of the novel into the film. It feels cluttered and episodic. At the same time Rushdie rather loses his focus on the children, whose powers resemble those of traditional comic-book superheroes, though their environment could not be farther from Batman's Gotham City. The protagonist, Saleem (Satya Bhabha), is born with telepathic powers and a continually runny nose. He is the son of poor street performers, but is switched at birth with Shiva (Siddharth), the child of a wealthy businessman and one of the most interesting characters in the book. But Shiva's story is dramatically curtailed here, while that of Saleem's family is left comparatively intact. The most glaring misjudgement however is Rushdie's voiceover, which continually describes what is actually being shown on screen. Nonetheless the film is stunningly beautiful. And the story retains at least some of the elements that made the novel so special in its imagination, ambition and scope.