Story
The Vaccine War is based on the book ‘Going Viral’ by Professor Balram Bhargava, Director General of Indian Council Of Medical Research (ICMR), and the revolves the efforts of India’s scientific community, bringing in limelight the unsung heroes who successfully created India’s Indigenous COVID-19 vaccine ‘Covaxin’ within just 7 months, in turn miraculously becoming one of the countries to export vaccines to help mankind in general.
Cast
Nana Patekar, Sapthami Gowda, Pallavi Joshi, Raima Sen, Girija Oak, Anupam Kher, Paritosh Sand, Sneha Miland, Nivedita Bhattacharya, Poorti Jai Agarwal, Mohan Kapoor.
Analysis
The COVID-19 outbreak was the most enormous, gigantic pandemic in the history of mankind and its aftermath still lingers on us, countries and economies and immunities are yet to bring themselves back on track.
More than the bigger picture, we lost a loved one, someone we knew and the helpless scraped on our soul.
The story follows the step-by-step making of Covaxin that was developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with ICMR and National Institute of Virology (NIV). Through an arduous runtime of 2 hours, 40 minutes, the medical drama revisits the events that unravelled in India following the outbreak of coronavirus in Wuhan, China. It also doubles up as a preachy rebuttal, countering the massive flak faced by the central government for its reported poor handling of the pandemic that took human lives in large numbers.
‘The Vaccine War’ can be broken into two tales. The first half tries to understand the lives of scientists and give their voice a platform. The latter desperately works as a government mouthpiece intended to whitewash allegations. The film soars in the first half and crashes in the second, as it undoes its sincerity and human emotion.
Projecting media as malicious and hinting that they are the real virus which need to be shut down, is the film’s weakest link. ‘This is not a bio war, this is an info war’, we are told. The narrative that media is a puppet of ‘foreign powers’ as they fund it, sounds like an unverified what’s app forward.
The film calls out certain journalists and their ideologies as ‘prejudiced’ but the narrative is a victim of that one-sided mindset itself. ‘Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it’ phrase is used to justify why press conferences aren’t necessary as the media only spreads misinformation. The total dismissal of contradicting views and giving it an anti-Bharat twist doesn’t work. Conspiracy theories that speculate if China deliberately leaked the virus, pharma lobbies, media trials and its nexus with foreign powers, it all sounds more opininated than factual.
The film scores in certain areas though. The script feeds off real characters, their day-to-day woes and workplace dynamics at a time of a global crisis. The storytelling gets the internal communication, organisational chaos and conflict right. The film is technically sound and superior to Agnihotri’s recent work. Nana Patekar as Dr Balram Bhargava (DG-ICMR) and Pallavi Joshi as Dr. Priya Abraham, Director-NIV are pitch perfect. Girija Oak Godbole is effective as Dr. Nivedita Gupta (ICMR).
The film is engaging as far as shining light on the Indian scientists is concerned. Its emphasis on overselling the atmanirbhar sentiment at a time of a grave global crisis which led to massive loss of human lives, feels a tad immature.
Critic’s opinion
There is plenty to like in The Vaccine War. Described as India’s first “bio-science film”, it bravely spends a lot of time on scientific terms, and in spartan NIV (National Institute of Virology) labs, over trials of mice and monkeys. There is no effort to spice up the research or jazz up the highly anaesthetised environments in which breakthroughs are made. On the contrary, Agnihotri’s devotion to his subject – with obviously the government’s full cooperation and access – veers the film often towards the look and feel of a public service broadcast.
The Vaccine War also whitewashes almost entirely the human misery of Covid, the pains of the immediate lockdown (which is projected as a proud achievement), the deaths caused due to lack of beds and oxygen, and the government playing catch up (the only blame allotted is to the Delhi government, “for procuring four times its requirement of oxygen”).
What lifts The Vaccine War is the fact that the story of Bhargava and his team of mostly devoted, hardworking women is worth telling. Bhargava, played to curmudgeonly effect by Patekar, is in the mould of those unlikely, self-effacing heroes that films adore – who lives simply, doesn’t use a smartphone, advocates eating without spoon as “fingertips trigger hunger”, adds ghee to food for “intelligence”, etc etc.
But, it’s The Vaccine War’s women who add light and depth to the story of Covaxin. There is Joshi playing NIV Director Priya Abraham, juggling her son’s wedding preparations with isolating SARS-CoV2; the head of the NIV lab which will achieve this, Pragya Yadav (Bhattacharya), who will turn to her neurosurgeon husband for help at a crucial time in the monkey trials; and ICMR epidemiology specialist Nivedita Gupta (Oak), who has to push away her crying, medically depressed son to head back to work. All three, especially Bhattacharya, are effective in their roles.
The women – and there are others – are who they are, doing their jobs like everyone else, neither dressed up, nor played down, even if Bhargava gets to give a speech about this. The contribution of women scientists in the Covid endeavour is a fact that needed to be underlined, as we celebrate the feat of their ISRO counterparts, and the film does that.