Written by: Hala Syed
Posted on: April 01, 2019 | 
| 中文
Qatan's army
It’s not fair to call Project Ghazi a train wreck, because train wrecks are exciting and the film is punishingly boring.
At best, Project Ghazi feels like a number of trailers strung together, beautifully mysterious but ultimately meaningless. The plot is indecipherable, the directing underwhelming, the dialogues atrocious and the editing choppy. Art direction and original score are the film’s only redeeming qualities. Without shape or structure, Ghazi’s nostalgic, grandiloquent, patriotic pastiche turns into a disjointed, muddled mess.
At the centre of the movie is Major Zain Zulfiqar (Sheheryar Munawar) and his relationship (or lack thereof) with his various father figures: his biological father whom he never got to know, his uncle, Dr. Zaid (Talat Hussain) who has ostensibly raised him, and his father’s best friend Salar (Humayun Saeed) who shows up as mentor and role model. A situation ripe for drama and conflict, except that the characters are such thinly drawn caricatures, that their back-story is inconsequential.
Syra Sheroz plays Zara Iftikhar, who switches from being a scientist to a military expert to a convenient sidekick, as required. Though she attempts to show authority and determination, her role in the narrative is so unclear that she comes off mostly as sullen and irrationally suspicious of Major Zain.
The main issue is that no matter how many times the characters talk about the importance of “Project Ghazi,’ we never really know what the project is. Are they creating super soldiers by finding people with superhuman abilities or attempting to create them through science? So far, Salar is the only survivor of the first experiment, and Major Zain is the latest incarnation.
Their fight is against Qatan (an unhinged Adnan Jaffar) and his men, who wear masks and spout nihilistic philosophies, their only motive to spread chaos. Salar takes on this faceless army – men who we must assume woke up and decided to attack us. It’s easy to justify killing them because they are not quite human. But Qatan has a dark plan: a gas he hopes to unleash that will bring out a man’s inner hate and aggression, resulting in mass violence. Ironically, this idea of a faceless angry villain who is destroying the fabric of society is also how war mongering propaganda works.
While the villains are evil, our superhuman heroes are not much better – they may be stronger and tougher but they are also soulless. With Munawar driving Major Zain from icy automaton to squishy sentimentalist, sometimes within the same interminable scene, the pacing is completely off. The acting is uniformly awful, with the possible exception of Adnan Jaffar who is clearly enjoying hamming it up. His villainous speeches and maniacal laughter are nonsensical, but at least they are enjoyable in this otherwise dull movie. There is an attempt to inject comic relief into this relentless tedium in the form of weapons expert, Dilawar (Amir Qureshi). But his non-sequiturs are so random and off-tone, that they fall flat. The action scenes are lackluster, mostly because if your protagonist is invulnerable, what are the stakes?
The success of a good sci-fi or superhero movie is never how big the robots are, or how impressive the visual effects are. It is to dig beyond all that, and show us what makes us human, but Project Ghazi eschews humanity for jingoism.
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