Slumdog Millionaire - film review

Slumdog Millionaire film review

Slumdog Millionaire is a film about a 18 year old boy Jamal and his love to Latika. He tries to find her through a TV quiz show and gets popular over the night. Jamal is the first „slumdog“, who was able to answer every question until the last, because the show has to end and it will go on the next evening. After the first evening, he is asked by the police, how he had known the answers. Jamal has to explain them, how he had connected happenings in his childhood with the questions. He had a very bad childhood, but he got to know Latika and fell in love with her as a little boy. The circumstances often had split them up, but Jamal never stopped thinking about her and sees her finally again, after he had to guess the right answer and won the million rupees.

I like the film very much, because it is social critical. It shows the life of street kids and orphans in slums. Often the scenes were very tragically and I was sometimes shocked, how current poverty in India is. The characters in the film have very poor fates. They, Latika, Jamal and his older brother Salim, became orphans during a religious fight and had to live on their own. They can`t go to school anymore and have to work as garbage collectors, in organized begging gang, and many other bad jobs. So they had no chance to get out of the slums and make a carrier anymore. There are very few people, who can get out of the slums, if they were born there.

The film is worth watching it. It`s not as the usual Bollywood film, because of the British director. I don`t even think, that the film would had become popular with an Indian director, because there would be more singing and dance scenes, what maybe  look unprofessional to the Hollywood industry.

It`s too great, that the young actors were real slum kids, that made the film seeming more like reality. For myself, it`s hard to understand, that much people suffer the same fate, like the characters in the film. I would recommend the film, because it is well done and it shows a part of India, which is not often represented in the media.