It hits you in the first minute of 120 Bahadur, that thin Ladakhi wind sliding across the screen like it has somewhere urgent to be. There is a stillness in the valley that feels almost suspicious, the way certain silences do right before life tilts. I remember shifting in my seat, sensing the film wanted me to pay attention even before a single soldier appeared.
When FARHAN AKHTAR does show up as Major SHAITAN SINGH BHATI, it is not with heroic thunder. He walks into frame like a man who has learned to keep his fear folded somewhere no one can see it. His face has that quiet, thinking look you sometimes catch on people who understand responsibility too deeply. Rezang La is not just a posting for him; it is a vow whispered to a landscape that rarely forgives anyone.
The film spends time letting you feel the mountains. The cold is its own character. You can almost taste the dryness of the air, the thinness of it, the way it must scrape through a soldier’s chest at dawn. And then come the numbers, almost absurd in scale. Around 120 Indian soldiers are holding a position against more than 3000 Chinese troops. You know this from history, but watching it play out with the valley stretching endlessly behind them makes the math land harder.
The combat scenes are rough in a way that feels honest, not stylized. Dust leaps up at the wrong moments. Men yell over gunfire that sounds too sharp. Nobody looks pretty in this war, which is probably why critics have been applauding the cinematography. There are shots where the soldiers become silhouettes against the ice, and you catch yourself staring not at the violence but the strange beauty tucked inside it. This is where the film feels the most alive.
Between the gunfire, the story slips back into the personal lives of the men. RAASHII KHANNA as Bhati’s wife shows up in warm, almost nostalgic sequences. They are tender enough, though sometimes they drift toward the expected. A few reviewers mentioned this, and I felt it too. The emotional pull does not always deepen in the way you hope. Still, something is comforting about those small domestic flashes. They remind you these men were not born for gunmetal skies. They had living rooms and laughter and people who waited for them.
Farhan Akhtar holds the center of the film with a calm kind of fire. He does not roar or swagger. Instead, he feels like a man constantly measuring the air, the enemy, the odds. There is a moment when he looks across the valley, and you see a flicker of doubt he refuses to acknowledge. That restraint, that refusal to indulge in theatrics, is what grounds the film.
But the thing about war dramas in India is that audiences have seen a lot of them. Some critics felt 120 Bahadur does not break new ground, and it is hard to argue with that. The beats are familiar. The swelling background score sometimes pushes too hard, other times fades when it should lean in. KOIMOI was not wrong about the score being inconsistent. You feel flashes of something powerful, then the moment slips.
The film’s release brought its own storm. A petition questioned whether it distorted the history of Rezang La and underplayed the contributions of the Ahir community. That debate has its own gravity, reminding everyone that history is not neutral territory. It is an emotional land. It belongs to families and communities long before it belongs to filmmakers or critics.
At the box office, the movie opened quietly. A little over two crore on day one is not the sort of number that shakes the industry awake. Maybe audiences were distracted. Maybe the genre felt heavy at a moment when people wanted lighter escapes. Or maybe certain films take time to be understood. Courage is not always fashionable. Sometimes it lingers quietly and grows later.
What stays with me is not the criticism or the praise. It is a single image. A handful of soldiers huddled behind a ridge, snow biting at their cheeks, their bodies bracing for a wave they know they cannot push back forever. They look small against that endless valley, but something about their stance makes the mountains seem smaller too.
The film may not reinvent the war drama, but it gives that moment back to us. Raw, cold, human. And honestly, that is enough. Rezang La deserved to be remembered with stillness and grit, not noise. 120 Bahadur tries to do exactly that, even when it stumbles. You walk out thinking about those men, their breath hanging in the frozen air, their resolve carved sharper than the wind.
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Zayn blends critical thinking with genuine fandom. Whether it’s decoding OTT series arcs or rating the latest Bollywood blockbuster, he writes with clarity, pop fluency, and a dash of irreverence.
