Team FC
If you were to ask me what the second season of Rocket Boys is about, I would not know where to begin, and if I did somehow find a thread from the show’s fabric to pull at, I would not know how to tug it through its end.
Rocket Boys is a show that is too much, but its too-much-ness is exactly what the medium of streaming was made for. With streaming, it was promised that you did not just have to tell the story of a person. You could also tell the story of a time
Rocket Boys is one of the most patient shows churned out of India. Writer and director Abhay Pannu will sit on a shot, luxuriate in cinematographer Oberai’s ashen lighting, swell slightly with Achint Thakkar’s musical score. There are over three-minute-long takes.
As you flip through decades and characters, timelines and storylines, a sense of bluster enters through the cracks of the show. Characters feel like helpless pawns of their destiny — things keep happening to them, in the midst of which there is little life to live.
Rocket Boys is, ultimately, a masterclass in staging comfort, in showing how people who have known each other for decades share space without clarifying or articulating this sharedness.