Audiences love an underdog story. But at times it seems like every variation of it has been told before. It's rare that a movie comes along that not only makes it feel effortless, but also new.
The Rocket, directed by
Kim Mordaunt is one of those movies.
The movie takes place in Laos, where in the first scene a young woman, Mali (
Alice Keohavong), gives birth to twins, one of whom is stillborn. In Mali's culture it is believed that one twin holds bad luck and one twin good, so the new mother is urged to kill her new child, as he could be the bad luck bearer of the two. Mali refuses, and her son Ahlo (
Sitthiphon Disamoe) grows up to be a bright, energetic ten-year-old talented in mechanics and mischief. Unfortunately the prophecy that Ahlo would bring his family bad luck turns out to be true. After that bad luck manifests itself in several horrible ways, Ahlo decides to prove his worth to himself and his family by entering a rocket-building competition that, if he wins, would give them enough money to live on.
I don't want to spoil the ending for you, so let me just say that what happens is probably exactly what you think will happen. But there were times leading up to the climactic scene where I was sure the movie would go in a different direction. For all that
The Rocket is a classic underdog story, it's not a light one, where nothing
truly bad happens and the stakes are never really that high. So even though the ending is predictable, it never felt forced. The same is true of the characters. There's the supportive best friend, the crotchety old mother-in-law, the eccentric uncle. But they're all real, fleshed-out characters, played brilliantly by a cast of mostly non-professional actors.
The Rocket is a positive movie that avoids sentimentality and emotional manipulation. Above all else, it feels natural. As someone with a knee-jerk reaction against cinematic sappiness who also likes to watch movies that
don't make me feel emotionally gutted, I for one appreciate that.
In Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the fundamentalist of the title is Changez (Riz Ahmed), a young Pakistani man who moves to the U.S. to study business at Princeton. He eventually realizes the American dream—a Wall Street job, money, an attractive girlfriend (Kate Hudson)—but a variety of factors, among them America's prejudicial attitudes toward the Middle East post-9/11 and his feelings of responsibility to his family and home country, eventually drive him to possibly radical political views.
