That heavy color-grading filter in the jungle scenes always makes every leaf look like it was dipped in cheap mustard oil, which if I'm honest, gets old by about episode three. It is a strange quirk for a streaming series with a budget that clearly didn't have to scrimp on actual dirt and period uniforms, yet Kabir Khan seems determined to turn Southeast Asian rainforests into a murky yellow soup. You watch the soldiers of the Indian National Army march through miles of digital undergrowth, and you keep wondering if anyone on the crew thought to turn down the saturation knob before hitting export. This is the kind of aesthetic choice that tries so hard to feel gritty that it ends up looking like a stale postcard from a history textbook no one actually read. We have seen this exact muddy look applied to half the war dramas coming out of Bombay lately, where the colorists appear to have only two settings on their palettes: sepia grief and iodine glory.

The story follows Subhash Chandra Bose’s forgotten regiments, though you wouldn't always know it from the central romantic friction eating up the runtime between the battle sequences. Sunny Kaushal charges around with a scowl that he clearly practiced in front of a mirror after watching Ryan Gosling in The Grey Man, but beneath the posture there is a genuine desperation to make you care about his ideals. He plays Sodhi, a lieutenant whose loyalty to the Azad Hind Fauj is tested by jungle rot, hunger, and a romance with Sharvari Wagh’s Maya that takes up far too much narrative oxygen. Wagh brings a sharp, piercing gaze to Maya, an intelligence operative who communicates almost entirely in loaded stares and quiet defiance. They share scenes that are supposed to crackle with forbidden wartime urgency, but too often they just stand there looking very attractive while breathing heavily through the smoke machines. It feels less like a historical reckoning and more like a high-end music video stretched out until the seams start tearing.

There is a specific supporting actor in the camp scenes—a grizzled sergeant who delivers half his lines with a distinct dubbing echo that never quite syncs up with his facial movements—and every time he opens his mouth to shout orders about artillery positions, the illusion of historical immersion completely shatters. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he appeared on screen because the sound design team couldn't be bothered to fix the ADR. When you are asking audiences to invest in the forgotten sacrifices of soldiers who marched from Singapore to Imphal, these tiny production shortcuts stick out like loose threads on a wool coat. The action choreography fares better during the ambush sequences, utilizing long, uninterrupted tracking shots that follow soldiers scrambling through trenches while mortars kick up real dirt and actual pyrotechnics singe the air. Khan knows how to stage a large-scale skirmish without losing the spatial geography, which keeps you grounded even when the digital matte paintings in the background look a bit too smooth and weightless.

Historically, hindi films have often struggled to handle figures as massive as Netaji without turning them into marble statues, and this series is no exception whenever Bose finally enters the frame to give a booming speech. He is treated with such reverent distance that he barely feels like a human being, functioning instead as a walking monument who exists purely to hand out inspiration and disappear back into the smoke. That reverence seeps into the script's treatment of the soldiers themselves, who are frequently robbed of their flaws in favor of spotless patriotism. They are brave, they are noble, they are constantly reminding each other why they are fighting for a free country, and they rarely get to just be messy, tired, or petty human beings stuck in a terrible situation. Tj Bhanu manages to carve out a bit of breathing room in her smaller role by playing against that earnestness with a weariness that feels earned rather than performed, anchoring some of the middle episodes when the plot threatens to stall out entirely in the mud.

The soundtrack relies heavily on brassy, swelling orchestral cues that signal your emotional cues long before the characters even realize what they are feeling, which feels like a waste of the subtle period atmosphere the sound effects department worked hard to build. You hear those same three horns blaring every time a character looks longingly at a photograph or stares out at a sunrise over the Andaman Sea, and after a while, the music starts acting like a teacher tapping a ruler against a desk to make sure you are paying attention. It is a shame because the quieter moments—the sound of boots squelching in monsoon mud, the distant crack of a sniper rifle echoing off wet canopy, the low murmur of men sharing scavenged rice around a dying fire—are far more effective at conveying the actual weight of history than any grandiose monologue about freedom ever could. When the series simply lets the characters exist in the silence between orders, it finds a strange, hollow grace that no amount of color-grading or orchestral swelling can quite manufacture or destroy.