Arun Matheswaran’s ‘Captain Miller’, has interesting ideas, but the film remains an emotionally aloof series of cool shots

The film stars Dhanush and Priyanka Arulmohan. The writing never dives deep enough to bring these characters alive.

If the mere presence of ideas is enough to make a movie, then Arun Matheswaran’s Captain Miller – set in the pre-Independence era – is a success. The hero played by Dhanush is a tribal named Analeesan, and this is possibly the first time we are seeing a “freedom struggle” against the British from the viewpoint of the oppressed. (I kept thinking about Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan a lot.) There’s also a reference to Sri Lankan history, as the director stated recently: Captain Miller was the other name for Vallipuram Vasanthan, who headed a Black Tiger attack on Sri Lankan troops. Other ideas in the screenplay include patriarchy. In a wonderfully casual scene, Analeesan talks about washing vessels while a woman cleans a rifle. And an Indian princess says that women are slaves – and yet, this film’s women (Priyanka Arulmohan, Nivedhithaa Sathish) do their bit for emancipation by firing guns and riding bikes and staging politically charged plays.

You can read the rest of the review here:

https://www.galatta.com/tamil/movie/review/captain-miller/

You can watch the trailer / video review here:

Copyright ©2024 GALATTA.