Pulang by Kabir Bhatia. I walked into this movie being sceptical about Malaysian movies, especially having been fed with countless bad local movies. How much different can this be? After all its a local movie. To my surprise, the movie was pretty good. Also, how often do you see a movie that was written and directed by two different individuals (kudos for teamwork!). To take a writer’s craft and doing justice to it with the director’s imagination is something very rare in Malaysian cinema.
Pulang is a big budget movie that is inspired by true events. It tells the story of husband and wife Othman and Thom. Othman decides to sail the world, hoping for riches, and promises his wife that he will return. 61 years later, she still waits for him.
Visually, I loved how the shots were composed. You can tell that the director understands cinema and it does not look like a stretched out short film or a drama that was being made for TV3. Technically, Pulang promises a big future for technicality for a big budget movie, though they could’ve invested in a better drone that delivers better image quality as at times it becomes very disconnecting visually.
In regards to post production, the quality of work was appropriate for the movie, the colour template used was nice. Scenes with the sky committed were beautiful, and it added character. The cinematographer knew how to light his characters and he knew how to direct the audience eyes to visually tell the story. Unfortunately, there were some scenes where you can tell that the director just shouted action and the person was waiting for the cue and those could’ve been cut short to keep the audience connected with the film. CG works are average, you can tell CG apart but the beauty of the movie is that, you forgive it because the CG helped the scenes and was not the driving factor for the movie.
As for the story, it was good, thought it was slightly draggy, and could’ve been shorter and certain emotions could have been better showcased with additional dialogues and maybe additional scenes. For example, Othman’s desire to improve his family’s life could’ve been better explained. Why Othman’s son did not tell the truth to his mom could’ve been explained in detail as it carries the movie and it becomes the very important scene. The relationship between Thom and her grandson could’ve been better explained to increase the emotion behind why he would travel all over Liverpool to find for his grandpa. Some scenes could’ve been better structured in a sense of actors positioning, for example, there’s a scene where Othman is being rescued from the sea with a life buoy and he was positioned vertically in the waters, as much as that scene helped with the logic of life buoy but I feel like it would have been more cinematic and metaphorical to have him horizontal to have the scene with more emotions.
Overall, I am very happy that I got the opportunity to watch this movie and I from the bottom of my heart enjoyed this movie very much despite all that I have had to say about this movie. It’s a very commendable effort by the team behind this. The budget for this movie was RM 6 million and believe me, they did all justice to the budget.
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