Review of Railway Men: The real-life tragedy of the gas leak feels overproduced | web series
Re-imagining a real tragedy is always difficult ground. How does the grim and gruesome imagery balance in the fabric of the dramatized limited series? In Shiv Rawail’s The Railway Men, which chronicles the horrific Bhopal Gad tragedy of 1984 in four beautifully cut episodes, the effect wears off pretty soon. The elements are all in place – effective performances from a committed cast, painstaking production design and an impossible story of human courage. Still, it just doesn’t add up. (Also read: The Hunger Games The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes review: An ambitious but flawed return to Panem)
building
How does one begin to tell such a dense and complex story? The Railway Men chooses to do so from a difficult center-right location, where a reporter played by Sunny Hunduja reports on how a corrupt system protects its criminals. Gandhi’s ideals of tolerance and non-violence have little reason. “An eye blinds the whole world,” he extols. Subtlety isn’t really this series’ strongest point, nor is nuance.
The scene shifts to the hours before the gas leak, as the characters and their respective (exhausting euphemism) backstories develop. Station Master Iftekaar Siddiqui (Kay Kay Menon, reliably good) is haunted by the brief flash of a child he failed to save. He takes in the young and intelligent Imad (the excellent Babil Khan), who reveals how he became close friends before the gas leak. He is the trustworthy one who will not bend his principles to anything else. There is also a thief who awkwardly poses as an officer of the Railway Protection Force. He may also grow a spine while running.
Meanwhile, R Madhavan casually quits midway as Central Railway General Manager Rathi Pandey. Juhi Chawla is added as a chief of staff who seeks important answers from the closed doors above. Meanwhile, a parallel track runs with a Sikh lady, played by Mandira Bedi, who finds herself in a communal riot, aided by a train guard (Ragubir Yadav). With so many characters and their individual stories jostling for space in the overcrowded template of this series, the viability of the gas leak results is lost pretty early on.
final thoughts
Tragedy strikes and the horrors slowly and steadily wreak havoc. People are dying. Chaos takes over. The tension builds from these thinly written characters that somehow fail to add any exposition as the episodes unfold. There are many unnecessary distractions that float away from the obscure study of results. For one, the entire subplot revolving around the wedding night that was cut short by tragedy, or the one where the German scientists argue about the dangers of the experiment, could have been removed.
Unfortunately, The Railway Men feels justified in appropriating large chunks of a terrible tragedy. The influence of the famous HBO series Chernobyl is noticeable in the textures and perspectives that The Railway Men tries so hard to achieve. The waste is evident – irresponsible managers, corrupt bosses, faulty standards and neglect that rests on the dead. Ultimately, The Railway Men feels too preoccupied with chaos, too focused on its approach to statement-driven disaster drama. He forgets to question the gut-wrenching terror that must live beneath the remains of the buried truth.
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