‘Space Gen: Chandrayaan’ Series Review: Failure to Launch

When Chandrayaan-3 nailed the first-ever soft landing on the South Pole of the moon in 2023, all I could think of was the mad scramble of studios to secure the rights to ISRO’s remarkable feat. I could almost sense it happening in real time. It didn’t take long for the child-coded euphoria to make way for an adult-coded wariness — who’s going to pitch first? Who’s going to overcook the perfectly good story? Who’s going to make the unglamorous heroes speak to each other like human ChatGPT apps? It felt inevitable, given the tailor-made ingredients: science, space, patriotism, spaced-out patriotism, a budget less than Nolan’s Interstellar, New India, first-world villains, a moon that doesn’t resemble Swiss cheese. TVF wasn’t on my Creator bingo card, but their slate has often used popular appeal to conceal themes of social conservatism and compliance over the years. Ironically, the current ‘2016 viral trend’ would flash back to TVF as the first movers and harbingers of Indian web storytelling. But space is not their jam; the future is not their cup of (mainstream) tea.

Space Gen: Chandrayaan is spectacularly tacky, simplistic, incurious and insincere. Much of it plays out like low-cost branded content, not a narrative dive into a history-making mission. The skit-like production value leaves no room for imagination. The project director (Shriya Saran) keeps reminding her male bosses that space exploration is about discovery and hope, yet the series seems more interested in the geopolitical race — and India as victims and underdogs — through the presence of a trash-talking diplomat (Gopal Datt). He could have been an interesting character, a bridge between bureaucracy and progress, but he insults the scientists in every other scene like a pantomime baddie, only to redeem himself on live television by defending them (“ISRO is India, what are you?”) against an Elon Musk-styled desi millionaire (he sips expensive scotch, you see) who wants to privatise space travel.

The VFX takes the outer-space sequences into the realms of parody. For instance, we see the ‘contest’ between two orbiters from different countries literalised to a point where one can be seen overtaking the other in space, as if they were Sanju and Shekhar during the final laps of Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992); even the news bulletin (“Russia has taken the lead!”) sounds like overzealous sports commentary. It might have been easier to focus on the intelligence of the characters and their indoor challenges alone (like Hidden Figures), but Mission Mangal tried that with the Mars Orbiter mission and the results were only marginally better.

The writing goes downhill the moment we hear “Space is the new Kargil” in the opening minutes of the series during the Chandrayaan-2 setback. Context: the protagonist, Arjun (a miscast Nakuul Mehta), is a maverick Navigation Systems Expert who lost his father in the war because of sub-standard satellite devices, so he vowed to become a scientist and turn India into a self-sufficient tech superpower. His father’s name was Vikram because the lunar lander he’s now in charge of is called Vikram; when the first mission fails, urgent dialogue like “we need to find Vikram” and “Vikram is not dead” trigger traumatic flashbacks. The problem is that Arjun’s genius-troubled psyche feels like an excuse to use a score that sounds like an Oppenheimer reference track; it’s as unsubtle as the Interstellar rip used during the nuclear tests in Parmanu: The Story of Pokhran (2018). One of the symptoms is that he is paranoid, and insists on designing firewalls to protect the launches from foreign malware attacks and hackers, a track that thankfully goes nowhere. Imagine a conspiracy subplot to amplify an accomplishment that is already, on its own, so impressive. Arjun is looking for someone to blame, but the enemy is within — the same could be said about most new-age historicals, or any artistically reductive show that presents the line “learn to love humans like you love machines” to make scientists look curmudgeonly and special. Credit to the series for not going mystical about the mission. Or maybe it did; a few local-Ramleela shots appear out of nowhere, and the payoff of watching comedian Danish Sait (as an engineer) unable to enter a door with 10 heads is not worth it.

There are also my old pet peeves. The government guy is holding a press conference to deliver good news, but multiple phones in the room ping together to reveal that the good news is actually a mistake; does Hindi cinema still have no other way to show alerts in real time? Why is nobody’s phone on silent? Is everyone subscribed to the same app? Is a nervous chatter around the room unfilmable? In what world do evil reporters start laughing in unison to show that they’re mocking the speaker? Why is everyone talking like they’re on the brink of the catchphrase in a detergent ad? Why do Arjun’s landing simulations look like errant 8-bit video games? What’s the need to include the contributions of a late industrialist and former President when these voice cameos are spoofy enough to rival the CGI Bill Gates from Half Girlfriend? Why does Arjun, like most on-screen mavericks, get all his scientific breakthroughs and epiphanies from everyday sights (like a “social distancing” protocol during lockdown)? Why does Prakash Belawadi play the same character again and again?

Why does a scientist make an IPL analogy only for the boss to remind them that they’re in Bengaluru, a pun that would’ve landed had RCB not won their first IPL just six months ago? Why do modern film-makers dumb down tech jargon and condescend to viewers under the guise of making things accessible? Why do reaction shots across the country look as if they’ve been instructed to behave like it’s the last ball of a World Cup final? These are some of the pressing questions that pile up over 5 mercifully short yet painfully long episodes. It's the kind of production that can convince wide-eyed geeks, star-gazers and IIT aspirants to give it all up and choose something safer — like playing cricket. Students deserve better; outer and inner space deserve better; the moon deserves better; fake American and Russian accents deserve better. Most of all, ISRO deserves better.