Midnight's Children (2013)
Average Rating: 5.6/10
Reviews Counted: 49
Fresh: 20 | Rotten: 29
Though Midnight's Children is beautiful to look at and poignant in spots, its script is too indulgent and Deepa Mehta's direction, though ambitious, fails to bring the story together cohesively.
Average Rating: 5.6/10
Critic Reviews: 16
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 12
Though Midnight's Children is beautiful to look at and poignant in spots, its script is too indulgent and Deepa Mehta's direction, though ambitious, fails to bring the story together cohesively.
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Average Rating: 3/5
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Movie Info
At the stroke of midnight on August 15th, 1947, as India declares independence from Great Britain, two babies are switched at birth by a nurse in a Bombay hospital. And so it is that Saleem Sinai, the bastard child of a beggar woman, and Shiva, the only son of a wealthy couple, are fated to live the destinies meant for each other. Over the next three decades, Saleem and Shiva find themselves on opposite sides of many a conflict, whether it be because of class, politics, romantic rivalry, or the
Cast
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Satya Bhabha
Saleem Sinai -
Shahana Goswami
Mumtaz/Amina -
Rajat Kapoor
Aadam Aziz -
Seema Biswas
Mary Pereira -
Shriya Saran
Parvati -
Siddharth
Shiva -
Ronit Roy
Ahmed Sinai -
Rahul Bose
General Zulfikar -
Charles Dance
William Methwold -
Kulbhushan Kharbanda
Picture Singh -
Anupam Kher
Ghani -
Darsheel Safary
The 10-year-old Saleem -
Soha Ali Khan
Jamila -
Zaib Shaikh
Nadir Khan -
Samrat Chakrabarti
Wee Willie Winkie -
Shabana Azmi
Naseem -
Sarita Choudhury
The Prime Minister -
Shikha Talsania
Alia -
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Salman Rushdie
Narrator -
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Midnight's Children Trailer & Photos
All Critics (49) | Top Critics (16) | Fresh (20) | Rotten (29)
The film is beautifully shot, with vivid production design. But because of the tale's lack of cohesion, it doesn't carry enough emotional heft.
Top CriticFaithfully adapted from Salman Rushdie's award-winning 1981 novel, the movie feels both too packed and too slight, overflowing with vivid details but lacking the structure to support their weight.
There are enough intermittent passages of power and beauty to get you through the slow spots.
A pretty but staidly linear epic drained of the novel's larkish, metaphorical sweep, and a collection of multi-generational love stories lacking their originally eccentric, fizzy charm.
Mehta has given us something as pale as it is panoramic.
Rushdie's characteristic antic humor animates the family scenes, but the movie gets bogged down in endless plot convolutions and whimsy (the material would have worked better as a TV miniseries).
Rushdie's script is faithful to his source novel to a fault. The lesson is that writers revisiting their work for another medium sometimes can't see the story for the words, to twist the old cliche about the forest and the trees
A highly eventful, allegorical portrait of the contentious dual nature of the Indian subcontinent.
Teeming with personality and digestible flights of fancy, only to be crushed by the overall narrative responsibility, unable to juggle faces and places to satisfaction.
A sprawling, lumbering epic that manages to preserve a substantial amount of the book's content but achieves little of its magic.
Rushdie adeptly trims his sprawling tale down to a still-substantial 2 1/2-hour movie, which only occasionally seems to hurry.
Stirring, beautifully filmed and highly personal history of India does right by Salman Rushdie's celebrated novel.
Both dreamy and dramatic, a fascinating view of Indian history seen through the prism of a personal story.
An ambitious film conveying the complicated and violent early history of India and Pakistan through the stories of two boys born on independence day.
Overproduced.
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April 25, 2013:
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Foreign Titles
- Mitternachtskinder (DE)
...but somewhere on the way to the screen, Salman Rushdie collaborating with director Deepa Mehta on adapting his own novel leaves behind much of the fantasy which made the book such an intriguing read about the midnight's children, the closer those born to midnight of independence day in 1947, the greater their special abilities, with an emphasis on the rivalry between Saleem Sinai(as a boy, Darsheel Safary, later, Satya Bhabha) and Shiva(Siddharth), both born exactly at midnight in the same hospital. Said fantasy would have definitely helped with the above allegory. Instead, the movie takes forever to get started(mind the generalization but I am beginning to suspect that everybody in India has a romantic tale of how their parents or grandparents met and fell in love) while keeping some details that are not exactly relevant to the larger story.