Suchin Mehrotra reviews Operation Safed Sagar: The Untold Story Of The Kargil War, directed by Oni Sen and created by Abhijeet Singh Parmar and Kushal Srivastava, for The Hollywood Reporter India. The six-episode Netflix series follows the Golden Arrows, the Air Force squadron that played a key role in winning the Kargil War in 1999, with its opening chapters covering the months leading up to the conflict — the coming-of-age-esque dynamics between young officers Baldy (Mihir Ahuja), Dhali (Abhay Verma), Sangy (Taaruk Raina) and Goofy (Arnav Bhasin) under a suitably stern Jimmy Shergill's Wing Commander B.S. Dhanoa aka Tony, a deeply affecting Siddharth's Squadron Leader Ajay Ahuja and Adil Hussain's Air Marshal Vinod Patney. But Suchin finds the far more compelling half of the narrative in the seedy scheming and political manoeuvring among Pakistan's top brass, where an excellent Vinay Pathak's Nawaz Sharif is a weak, easily manipulated leader unable to control his own cabinet, and a terrific, show-making Manu Rishi Chadha's Pervez Musharraf quietly masterminds an illegal operation to cross the LOC and seize Indian posts on Kargil's unforgiving peaks.
Some narrative turbulence and rough edges aside, Suchin says the show lands on target — despite the flat Netflix aesthetic and shaky production design, Oni delivers effective, simple storytelling done well, balancing a small army of characters with air combat set pieces whose execution and VFX are among the most convincing and coherent Hindi cinema has managed, certainly more so than Shoorveer, Skyforce and perhaps even Fighter. He finds it at its best when the focus is on the Kargil conflict itself rather than any one character, which is why the third episode is easily the strongest, and he likes that the Pakistani leadership are written as calculating villains rather than wafer-thin cartoons, with Vinay's contradictory, stance-shifting Sharif the most interesting character here. The maximum casting leaves an army of blink-and-you'll-miss-them actors stranded, only two of the young officers get any real arc, and at perhaps an episode too long the show can't quite muster the stirring emotion and impact of loss that more deeply felt stories manage. Suchin's THR Bottomline: a solid war story that hits harder as a tale of strategy and stakes rather than sacrifice, and one you still step away from feeling a sense of triumph and pride. Operation Safed Sagar: The Untold Story Of The Kargil War is now streaming on Netflix.
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