There is a specific kind of digital sheen on the grass during the early battle sequences in Manikarnika that makes you wonder if anyone looked at the monitor before calling print. It is too bright, aggressively green in a way that belongs to a screensaver rather than the plains of Jhansi, and if I am honest, it sets a strange tone for a historical epic about the 1857 rebellion. You sit there in the dark watching horses gallop across fields that look like they were rendered by an intern on a dying laptop, waiting for the real grain of celluloid to kick in, or at least some dirt that looks like dirt instead of cocoa powder dusted over a green screen. The film spent months in the trades for its troubled backstage shuffle, with Kangana Ranaut eventually taking over directorial duties from Krish, and that jagged, patched-together authorship shows up less in the narrative arcs and more in these micro-visual inconsistencies where one scene looks like a prestige drama and the next resembles a cutscene from an outsourced video game.

Ranaut plays Rani Laxmibai, starting from her days as the fiercely independent Manikarnika who hunts tigers and spars with wooden swords before marrying the Maharaja of Jhansi and stepping into a political furnace. She is relentlessly, exhaustively committed to the physicality of the role, leaping off balconies on actual horses and swinging broadswords with a wrist-snap that suggests she spent months in a gym rather than just learning choreography for the camera. There is an intensity to her stare that borders on the unhinged, which actually works for a woman watching her kingdom get systematically dismantled by the East India Company through administrative theft and military aggression, refusing to play the compliant widow waiting for British pension payouts. But that fierce dedication occasionally flattens out the quieter human beats, leaving very little room for doubt or hesitation because she is always standing ramrod straight, delivering dialogue like every sentence is carved into stone. When she shares the frame with Danny Denzongpa, who plays the loyal Ghulam Ghaus Khan with a world-weary gravity that anchors half the early runtime, you can feel the friction between two entirely different acting schools operating under the same heavy costumes.

The script, credited partly to Baahubali writer K.V. Vijayendra Prasad, relies heavily on rousing speeches delivered from balconies and horseback, treating historical dialogue like an excuse for theatrical chest-beating rather than human exchange. Every British officer is sneeringly aristocratic in the manner of a local stage production of a Dickens novel, twirling invisible mustaches and expressing casual cruelty with tea cups in hand, which drains the geopolitical conflict of any real texture. Ankita Lokhande, making her feature debut as Jhalkari Bai, brings a surprising, grounded energy to the second half, managing to match Ranaut’s physical ferocity during the combat sequences without losing her breath in the dialogue scenes. Yet the editing by Rameshwar S. Bhagat chops up these performances into frantic, fast-cut collisions where you rarely get to watch a reaction play across a face for more than a second before the camera careens to a wide shot of an explosion or a charging cavalry unit. It is hard to track spatial geography during the sieges because the camera is always too close to a flying sword or too far away from the ramparts, losing the rhythm of the battle in a blur of digital smoke.

Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's musical score tries to muscle the emotion over the finish line when the visuals fall short, deploying massive choral arrangements and thunderous percussion that sometimes drown out the dialogue entirely. There is a recurring motif during the battle prep scenes that sounds suspiciously like a temp track left in by mistake, looping every single time the troops start marching toward the gates. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me more than the historical inaccuracies or the dodgy CGI because it breaks the illusion of scale, reminding you that you are watching a heavily manufactured product of modern commercial hindi films rather than an organic epic. The costume design by Neeta Lulla deserves credit for avoiding the sleek, overly polished look that plagues contemporary period dramas, opting instead for heavy cottons, battle-scuffed armor, and traditional jewelry that actually looks worn by people living through a siege, even if Ranaut’s hair somehow manages to stay perfectly blow-dried through cannon fire and hand-to-hand combat.

Cinematographer Nimai Ghosh captures some striking tableaus in the static palace interiors, using natural window light to carve out the oppressive isolation of the royal court before the rebellion shatters the stone walls. Those moments feel closer to the intimate historical drama of Shyam Benegal’s Junoon than the bombastic arena-rock aesthetic of standard commercial bollywood releases, hinting at a better, stranger movie buried beneath the studio mandates. But those quiet interludes are constantly interrupted by the mandate to remind the audience every ten minutes that the lead actor is a one-woman army capable of dispatching a dozen redcoats with a pair of daggers while doing a backflip off a cannon. That relentless hagiography turns a genuinely fascinating anti-colonial resistance fighter into a mythic superhero, stripping away the actual grit of the 1857 uprising in favor of an endless parade of slow-motion hero shots. You leave the theater feeling battered by the sheer volume of the enterprise, having watched a project that wanted so desperately to be a cultural monument that it forgot to breathe.

There is an exhausting moral certainty to the way the narrative handles its antagonists, reducing complex imperialist machinations to personal slights and broad villainy that feels cribbed from comic books rather than archival research. The British officers speak entirely in condescending declarations about the white man's burden, robbing the historical conflict of its systemic machinery and replacing it with individual bad actors who deserve a good sword to the ribs. It’s a familiar trap for big-budget hindi movies tackling national history, where nuance is treated as a liability and patriotism must be shouted at the back rows through megaphones made of brass and percussion. Ranaut clearly wanted to stake a claim for women-led action cinema on a massive scale, proving that a female protagonist could carry a ?100-crore war epic without leaning on a male star to sell tickets at the box office, and on that front, the film is a definitive success regardless of its stylistic messiness. The problem is that the ambition of the production constantly outruns its craftsmanship, leaving behind a scarred, lurching artifact that is far more interesting to dissect as an expression of its star's personal brand than as a coherent cinematic experience.