Pankaj Batra holds on a close-up of a muddy boot for four seconds too long in the opening reel of Sajjan Singh Rangroot, a stylistic stutter that tells you everything about the production's ambition outstripping its grace. You can feel the heavy machinery of the period piece straining against the edges of the frame, desperate to convey historical weight without quite knowing where to park the camera while the actors catch their breath. The dialogue arrives in bursts of thick Punjabi that occasionally swallows its own consonants, mixed with a sound design that drops rifle cracks with the concussive force of a construction site falling down a concrete staircase. It is a war picture about the British Indian Army on the Western Front, which immediately invites comparisons to 1917, though Sam Mendes had a massive studio backlot and a limitless budget to orchestrate his continuous takes. Rangroot operates on a much tighter leash, relying on grit and geographic approximation to sell the trenches of France, and if I'm honest, the mud looks a bit like chocolate syrup under the harsh noon sun.

Diljit Dosanjh plays the title character with a quiet, watchful restraint that mostly keeps the movie from sliding entirely into patriotic melodrama. He does not posture as a cinematic soldier of the old school. Instead, he slouches, he looks away when the British officers start shouting in English, and he carries his Lee-Enfield rifle like a carpenter hauling a plank of green lumber. There is a weariness in his eyes that feels genuinely earned by the third reel, far removed from the polished sheen we usually get in mainstream Hindi films where the heroes emerge from explosions with their hair perfectly styled. Yograj Singh brings a barking, bruised authority to his supporting role as an older hand who has already lost the plot, while Sunanda Sharma makes a brief, poignant impression back in the Punjab village as the lingering memory of domestic peace. Dosanjh grounds the chaos because he never tries to act like he is in a war movie. He just reacts to the noise.

The cinematography by Vineet Malhotra shifts wildly between stunning golden-hour expanses of mustard fields that look like they were pulled straight from a tourist board pamphlet and aggressively gray-filtered trench sequences that drown out all texture. You lose the geography of the battlefield during the night raids, a classic editing crutch to hide the fact that twenty extras can only simulate a brigade if you cut fast enough. Then there is the background score, which leans into the emotional beats with the subtlety of a brass band playing inside a telephone booth. It's a small thing, but the main theme plays three times in twenty minutes during the midpoint training montage, each time swelling louder until you want to reach into the speakers and turn the dial down yourself. War cinema demands atmosphere, and when the film trusts the silence of the trenches—the low murmur of men sharing rations, the distant drone of artillery—it achieves a strange, suspended power that the louder action sequences constantly undercut.

Pankaj Batra's direction wobbles whenever the script tries to articulate the larger geopolitics of colonial enlistment, reducing complex imperial exploitation to earnest conversations around a campfire. The screenplay wants to honor the forgotten Sikh soldiers who bled in foreign mud without ever fully interrogating why they were there, preferring instead to focus on interpersonal brotherhood and the simple instinct to survive. It is an omission that keeps the story small, which might actually be its saving grace. Instead of swelling into a generalized statement about the futility of conflict, it stays lodged in the specific terror of young men freezing in wet wool uniforms thousands of miles from home. You see the machinery of empire grind down individuals who signed up for economic survival, yet the narrative keeps pulling back to safe, familiar tropes of camaraderie and rural nostalgia. Bollywood movies have historically struggled to depict foreign military campaigns without leaning heavily on either jingoism or dry textbook reenactment, and while this project sidesteps the worst excesses of both, it occasionally drifts into a neutral middle ground that lacks a distinct ideological pulse.

The pacing collapses around the hour-and-a-half mark as the narrative stalls in a French field hospital, lingering on wounded soldiers trading glances that have already been established three times over. Dialogue scenes drag because the actors are given lines that reiterate what the audience can already see on their faces. Still, there is a rough-hewn integrity to the whole enterprise that prevents it from feeling entirely cynical. Dosanjh never drops his guard, keeping his performance anchored in physical reality even when the production design threatens to turn into a high school history pageant. When he stares down the barrel of a German machine gun, you aren't thinking about the historical significance of the regiment or the geopolitical chess game of the First World War. You are just watching a guy from a village in Punjab trying to make it through the next five seconds without getting his legs blown off. The movie leaves you with that small, brutal image long after the grander speeches fade into the background noise.