There’s something innately sincere about The Last Salute, a documentary about the 62-year-old marriage between the MiG-21 and the Indian Air Force (IAF). It revolves around the retirement of the iconic Soviet fighter jet in 2025, leading up to its farewell ceremony while telling its story through the lens of the chosen few who were qualified to fly them. “A Love letter to MiG-21” is part of the title, so it’s more of a personal ode than a formal chronicling; its reputation as “a flying coffin” is hastily dismissed and neatly glided over. It’s just like watching one partner say goodbye to another after a long and eventful relationship, choosing to remember them fondly despite all the flaws and illnesses. Given that it’s from the creator of the recent Kargil series, Operation Safed Sagar, perhaps this apolitical and isolated wistfulness isn’t surprising.
There’s a specific way we used to imagine fighter jets in the post-Top Gun era. All fire and brimstone, skill and daring, speed and ray-ban-coded masculinity — one of those rare ‘sexy’ professions that didn’t really need fiction to canonise it. Patriotism and duty and context were almost incidental; the dreamy affair between man and machine alone provided the thrills. The Last Salute manages to capture some of that no-strings-attached passion, if only because it humanises the real-world pilots (who become no less than superheroes in the movies) and allows them to describe their one true love. At some level, it resembles a portrait of anticipatory grief featuring specialists seeing their profession change — and evolve. It becomes a bit like hearing a celebrated author speak about her old-fashioned and dated typewriter, or a jockey bidding farewell to an aged (and occasionally dangerous) prize horse. The stakes are higher here, of course, but the rose-tinted prism of nostalgia is the same.
There are those classic ‘intro’ shots of the squadron members (striding in unison) tasked with the final send-off. There are a few history bits about the plane’s starring role in Indian wars over the decades, not least the famous Safed Sagar anecdotes. There’s also a dearth of archival footage, which is understandable, but the access is more emotional than physical. It’s primal when they speak; the best parts are the faces and voices of the pilots who describe their first time, their reading of the plane’s moods, their near-death incidents, their choppy honeymoon phase with the machine that took no prisoners, and their bittersweet anecdotes. There’s clear segregation in terms of the subjects to be covered: the present, the past, the families, the technical airmen, the criticism, the banter of how the MiG-21 pilots see themselves as purists (“thoroughbreds”) compared to the others, and the event itself. But that’s just the rhythm of the traditional PSA template.
I like the tiny ‘narrative’ touches: like revealing that two of the interviewees (one of them an RT controller, the other a wing commander) are married midway through the documentary, like focusing on the supersonic status and the euphoria of being in the cockpit, like finding humour in their memory of their early sorties, or casually framing the one female squadron member (without any fuss) and her inner courage to realise that the jet does not recognise genders. The pride is not performative, because they have no choice but to understand and love the plane that the rest of the world was wary of; they speak of others’ envy, because it’s also the story they must tell themselves to justify the danger and privilege of maneuvering it.
As a result, I wouldn’t call it romanticisation or advertising; it’s a distinctly normal feeling that people from all walks of life experience when the end of a phase arrives. The heaviness of leaving does not feel curated. It just so happens that they’re in the armed forces, and their attachment feels stronger because suppression is usually the language of training. The release of seeing these hardened pilots expressing themselves about the one constant they could control — but not tame — defeats the most ardent cynics.
I’m one of those cynics because I have trust issues with any title that’s designed to glorify the country without examining sides. But The Last Salute feels like a small piece of a heart that’s too often abused by official bodies and soulless ideologies. It’s what we, as kids, would think of when we aspired to punch through the clouds, break sound barriers and go higher and faster than everyone else. At one point, a former fighter pilot speaks of how flying the modern jets feels like a science, but flying the MiG-21 remains an art. One could say the same about the identity of The Last Salute within this genre of storytelling. It’s more instinctive than studied: a throwback to comic-book softness before our screen was co-opted by the commerce of opportunistic biopics.