The Vaccine War movie review

The Vaccine War

Watched the movie The Vaccine War. To sum it up, a pretty good movie that you should watch. To honour the achievements of our (medical) scientists and how India came together to fight COVID-19. Pretty accurate (though not fully) and exposes many things that main stream media may not have covered, but social media (especially Twitter) did. More details below.

Overall: 8.5

Research - 9

Perspective - 8.5

Acting - 8.5

Character sketch - 7.5

Story telling - 8.5

Picture quality - excellent

This isn't a suspense film. So going into the details in the next couple of stories. Skip if you want to watch with a fresh mind though.

Research: The strongest part of the film. Shows a pretty accurate timeline of things that happened not just in India, but around the world as far as COVID-19 goes. The origin of the virus - Nov 2019, not end of Dec 2019, the theories around origin - lab leak far more plausible than the wet market one, spread beyond China. Italy being affected, Iran being affected, phases of developement of vaccine, frontline health workers getting vaccine first, vaccine hesitancy, the toolkit gang and propaganda, devastation due to the 2nd wave, then 2nd wave subsiding, massive vaccinnation program, finally the epidemic subsiding. 

There are a couple of inaccuracies though. While NIV isolated COVID-19 virus and developed the indigenous antibody detection kit, ICMR/NIV did not develop the vaccine per se. It was Bharat Biotech in collaboration with ICMR.

Perspective: It covers a lot of things well about events around the world and the development of the vaccine, but a couple of shortcomings. Firstly "vaccine nahi hai to life hi nahi hai". treatment/building immunity etc are pretty important as well. India did have Covishield as well, so Covaxin not the only option for India.

Secondly, India has developed many vaccines in the past few decades. Here the film underplays that and makes it look like that spirit/achievements.

Acting: To me, the two acting performances that stood out the most were Girija Oak's Dr.Nivedita and Raima Sen's Rohini Singh Dhulia. Girija Oak plays an earnest, hardworking, likeable scientist with consummate ease while Raima Sen plays a conniving devious propagandist science journalist very convincingly.

Nana Patekar has some excellent moments, but its a bit up and down solely due to the character sketch. He is good overall obviously, but considering this is Nana Patekar who is a top notch actor, could've been better with a better character sketch.

Pallavi Joshi as Dr.Priya Abhraham, Nivedita Bhattacharya as Dr.Pragya have done their roles well. As have Anupam Kher as govt official and Mohan Kapoor as Dr.Raman Gangakhedkar. Saptami Gowda's character wasn't really written well and acting was lacking. But overall for all the actors/actresses in the film, pretty good.

Character sketch: The weakest part of the film. Nana Patekar's Dr. Balram Bhargava character sketch: The positive aspects are the go getter can do attitude, respect for science, Indian spirit, culture etc. But negative ones are under-appreciativeness of achievements, head of ICMR not knowing about Android/iOS difference &not having Whatsapp (really?) and being so resistant to addressing the press with scientific facts/perspective till the very end.

A little unfair putting down of the male scientists at NIV when asked about Iran mission - like none of them were ready to go. In reality, the team had many men (as the film itself shows at the end when showing the real life people involved)

The character sketch of Dr. Priya Abraham (Pallavi Joshi), Dr.Pragya (Nivedita Bhattacharya), Dr.Nivedita (Girija Oak) etc are done well for most part. But Dr.Pragya doing all the housework after being exhausted from all the work in the lab when her husband reminds her that househelp will do it is just unrealistic. Not getting qualified people right away for the scientific work is also a -ve. So overall, decent character sketch, but does have flaws.