My Concerns About Hindi Netflix Series The Bard of Blood
I am happy that bigger production houses and bigger stars are gravitating towards Netflix and the web-series format. Still, I wouldn’t be too excited by Bard of Blood, I’ve noticed some red-flags that signal that writing wasn’t given its due attention.
RED FLAG 1: ONE LONG CONSPICUOUS ENGLISH DIALOGUE
There’s one weird pattern — when somebody has to emphasize something, they say it first in their native language, then switch to English and say the same thing. For some reason, it sounds more credible but only if the sentence is short E.g. ‘Mard ban, be a man!’ from DCH. If the sentence is too long, it feels like the person is putting in too much effort to sound profound, ends up sounding not so.
RED FLAG 2: GUNS ARE DISCARDED TO SETTLE ISSUES THROUGH HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT
This is an old cliche. The stories doing this usually prefer appearing macho over practical. The combat better be mind-blowingly fresh and inventive, like John Wick series, else it’s just a lot of macho posturing. (Macho Posturing: Posing as if you pulled off something insanely smart/courageous, without actually doing it. E.g: Dhoom 2. The plan to steal the diamond is based on the assumption that security guards don’t turn their heads.)
RED FLAG 3: TITLES ARE CLICHE
Check this movie’s title, then check the movie War’s title, then check the fonts of hundreds of war-based video games. Stencil- Rusted Metal combination is a typical choice.
A cliche is not a bad thing in itself, but too many of those usually mean nobody’s interested in telling a fresh story or a story in a fresh way. Unless, the movie is self-aware of all these tropes, which it doesn’t seem to be, we are going to get the same old stuff. (Some hybrid of Ek Tha Tiger, Phantom, Baby,etc., which themselves were a hybrid of a few other movies.)
RED FLAG 4: THE ADS FOCUSING MORE ON SRK AND HOW MACHO EMRAAN HASHMI’S CHARACTER IS
I had heard this somewhere, tough men don’t claim they’re tough men. In Chhota Bheem, the lead himself proclaims ‘Main chatur, saahasi, aur buddhimaan hoon’ and then the side characters also repeat it. The same aesthetic for most of the Salman/Akshay Kumar movies. When makers prefer to tell rather than show the badassery, that usually signals that either all the badassery would be ridiculously implausible (works only because hero’s doing it) or, since they haven’t taken effort to actually frame badassery, it has been borrowed from foreign movies.
This would be sad because the movie is set in Balochistan. Imagine, what an opportunity to build a world, to show in great detail how hostile and ruthless these terrains are. The cruelty must have seeped into the smallest of the activities. And the villain, how he must’ve been exceptionally efficient and cruel to be able to rise in ranks and ruling these people. But no, we’ll get a generic terrorist-head whose cruelty is a generic beheading. Don’t expect anything more than generic things.
I hope I am proven wrong and this series is way more entertaining than anyone’s anticipations. For now, though, I would curb my expectations.