One of the most persuasive Hindi films of this year, Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis, is composed of two timelines. The past is centered around tank commander Arun Khetarpal, the young hero of the Battle of Basantar during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war. The present — a few years after the 1999 Kargil war — features Arun’s old father visiting his own childhood village near Lahore, grieving the martyrdom of his son, and mourning the futility of a decades-old conflict. In short, the film is a poignant anti-war drama dressed up as a slick war actioner. The present becomes a contemplative critique of the past and the future. Netflix’s latest, Operation Safed Sagar, is only a slick war actioner: nothing more, nothing less. It’s the equivalent of the Arun Khetarpal timeline existing as an isolated biopic. There’s no melancholic asterisk and no moral ambiguity; its disguise is its reality.
It unfolds as a conventional war story. You know, the kind that celebrates the victors and condemns the vanquished; the sort that showcases courage and scoffs at cowardice; the kind where every sacrifice is a measure of loyalty before humanity. The title refers to the code-name of a historic operation by Indian Air Force (IAF) pilots at the height of the Kargil war. It revolves around the specific heroics of the Golden Arrows Squadron, which carries out high-altitude airstrikes and reconnaissance missions to flush out enemies positioned on snowy mountain peaks. There’s no disputing the facts (or chronology) of this story: Pakistani troops infiltrated several outposts, they violated the Lahore Declaration, the IAF mission turned the tide, and India won the battle. No garnish is needed. But it’s often the context — the timing and intent of telling these true stories — that shapes our relationship with such shows. It’s harder to convey the sincerity of a national victory in 2026 than ever before.
The series, however, chooses its identity. Within this traditional framework of the genre, Operation Safed Sagar is fairly effective. It follows the beats of a regular ‘sports’ drama. India’s Good Guys are training for the annual war games exercise at the Bhatinda base: five brash greenhorns, presumably Top Gun fans, are mentored by seniors Tony (Jimmy Shergill) and Ahuja (an in-form Siddharth). Simultaneously, Pakistan’s Bad Guys across Rawalpandi and Islamabad are preparing to betray Indian PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s (an uncanny Anjan Srivastav) peace visit: Army chief Pervez Musharraf (a terrific Manu Rishi Chadha) begins to manipulate a naive PM Nawaz Sharif (Vinay Pathak) into capturing LoC territories and force their neighbours to bring Kashmir onto the table. Sharif and his cabinet, it is suggested, stay unaware of Musharraf’s masterplan of disguising Pakistani soldiers as mujahideen militants in the mountains.
For the first three episodes, Operation Safed Sagar sails through the setup and thrives on the template. The coach-and-team format in India lays the stage for friendship conflicts, character-building, bonding and banter at the AIF base; each of the characters acquires a label of sorts (the emotional one, the cocky one, the level-headed one, and so forth). One of the rookies even cites a physics-defying scene from Cliffhanger as his inspiration to fly; the dour trainer dances to his favourite Baazigar song at a party. The internal turmoil in Pakistan happens across offices, phone calls and secret meetings; the score gets somber every time the series cuts to their side. The film-making sticks to the basics, trading gimmicky action stunts for a coherent visual language: more Gunjan Saxena (whom I expected a Kargil-multiverse cameo from) than Fighter.
It’s nothing new, but the large ensemble cast shines, weaving exposition into the exchanges without yanking us out of the story. Not for the first time (after Saare Jahan Se Accha and Dhurandhar), the Pakistan portions are more interesting to hear and watch. The actors (especially Manu Rishi Chadha and his coldly bureaucratic Musharraf) do wonders with the palette of power-hungry politicians. The reasons are obvious. These characters are where the writers can liberate themselves from the shackles of fidelity; they use creative license to depict different shades. To their credit, they don’t overdo the villainy, though Vinay Pathak’s Sharif comes pretty close to being an overgrown child (a la Anupam Kher in The Accidental Prime Minister) humiliated by the elders. The Indian portions are watchable, but the characters are rarely offered a choice beyond white-knight decisions, underdog suffering, and noble traits. They can do no wrong because they’re Indian. Most historical dramas are treated as mythological truths, so the contrast isn’t surprising.
As a modern-day viewer, you keep looking for traces of personality. Not necessarily images of trauma or guilt, but just some stillness. Like when a miffed Vajpayee tells Sharif that he may have ruptured the trust between two cultures for generations to come; it sounds similar to Dharmendra’s lament in Ikkis, as well as Odysseus’ own confession once he changes warfare forever by violating Zeus’ law with the Trojan-horse stunt. But there’s no scope for introspection here; the writing is afraid that it will be construed as a sign of weakness. Another instance is when the diplomatic war hijacks the mission and threatens to reduce a grief-stricken squadron to passive participants. You expect them to rebel and do their thing (a meta hope, given the reverse-presence of a Rang De Basanti actor), exposing diplomats as people who seldom know the emotions of those at the border. But internal strife is a no-no; the fictionalisation of events can only work one way. So the officers are instead tempered by their chief; their personal desire for revenge morphs into a public display of patriotism.
The last two episodes are one-dimensional. There’s plenty of technical planning and action, but narrative fatigue kicks in because it’s a small-screen show and not a big-screen film. There’s only so much the VFX pieces can do. It’s essentially the same sequence on loop: hit a roadblock, chief calls the mission off, Tony gets an idea, he seeks permission/trials, aerial set-piece, Pakistani soldiers blown to smithereens, Musharraf smokes pensively. Rinse, repeat. A few neat touches barely register — like the cricket commentary announcing India’s openers (Tendulkar and Ramesh) in the 1999 World Cup match set against a shot of senior pro Tony and his rookie stepping into their jets. All the characters get their payoff moments, even if the mind wanders to Pakistan and the impending coup of General Musharraf following PM Sharif’s loss of control. There’s nothing more fascinating than the volatility of a failed state.
The valour of the Indian pilots jostles for attention, despite the fact that it doesn’t feel like much of a contest. The stakes are hard to measure, because the focus remains solely on the Air Force and not the precise manner in which it aids the army and their own Operation Vijay. It’s why a popular actor (Barun Sobti) plays the role of the Lieutenant General who spells out the plans, so that we take notice and forgive the absence of visual context. That’s what a stacked cast does — it offsets the flaws and seduces the viewer into going with the flow. It’s nice to see Jimmy Shergill as the lead after years of being typecast as a gangster-coded suitor; it’s a callback to his early Bollywood days, where the integrity on his face often determined the heroes he played. I'm not sure the speeches towards the end do his character any favours; it flatlines the one man burdened with the survival guilt of losing a friend. Of the squadron members, Abhay Verma and Mihir Ahuja have the meaty parts as the team’s chalk and cheese, and they make the most of it.
There’s no point knocking Operation Safed Sagar for being a reverential tribute rather than an artful rumination. It lays the foundation in the very first episode. There’s a scene where Tony tests his troops by asking them their opinions on the peace summit. Most of them chime up, revealing their ideological slants. He then shuts them up by declaring that “politics is not the field of the IAF, it is not for us to think about who can be trusted and which country is better; our job is to execute and kill”. The message is clear: this is not going to be a series that’s concerned with philosophical questions about the futility of violence, cross-border equality, the cost of sacrifice, and the remorse of men who don uniforms. It’s a prelude to the ghar-mein-ghus-ke-maarenge syndrome. Unlike in Sardar Udham or Main Vaapas Aaunga, the spotlight is on the grammar of heroism, not the atonement for greatness.
If we come from a space of seeing these soldiers as machines who cannot afford to be human, the few glimpses of feelings (like a girlfriend showing up at the base) — and the tragedy that drives the success of their mission — might be rewarding. The action then becomes an extension of everything they aren’t trained to suppress. It helps to see them as professionals and families who put so much on the line that they have no choice but to believe in the sanctity of the country they are paid to defend. In that sense, Operation Safed Sagar mirrors the national mood better than others in its ilk. This can be engaging or exhausting, depending on who you are and what an ‘ilk’ means to you. After all, curiosity lies— and deceives — in the eyes of the beholder.