So y'all know what I'm up to in the backgrounds:

Debatably the most highly anticipated Bollywood film this year has now seen its release. Kicking off a trend of remakes and modern day adaptations, this one is most certainly one that falls under both categories.

Firstly I shall talk about the origins:
The Amitabh starring ‘Don’ of 1978 was without a doubt comparable back then to something as large scale as Star Wars, certainly not through never seen before special effects or sci-fi, but merely through being ahead of its time.

The producer (Nariman Irani) was a cameraman who was in deep debt after his first film Zindagi Zindagi (Life Lifebit the dust. So to get out of this financial mess he was advised by what later became the cast & director of Don (Amitabh Bachchan, Zeenat Aman & Chandra Barot) to make another film.

It was a very high risk taken by the producer taking on this particular script, since originally, the script did not even have a name. It was a script pertaining to a character called Don & that is all there was. The writers Salim-Javed hadn’t been able to sell the script for a long period of time, in fact it had already been rejected by a number of large production houses as they considered it unsafe forcommercial cinema for being so unconventional.

Nariman must have found it a gripping enough read to take such a risk with it as it was clear that this film was to make or break his film career, & right he was to do so.

Once it saw a release, it took much praise by all viewers for finding a happy medium between being commercial & entertaining, yet maintaining originality. Within the industry we hadn’t seen anything of this nature before, it hit the industry like a storm and was in a short time considered a cult classic (& still is).

Like children of the 70’s & early 80’s rant on about Star Wars, in India it was all about Don, with children imitating the character of Don, quoting his cool dialogues, or even choreographing themselves to the Khaike Paan song as immortalised by the Big B.

Now in this day & age, those children have come into their own, become actors, directors, producers & this (I guess) brings us to why Farhan Akhtar (son of Javed, who originally wrote the script) felt a remake of this cult classic was now due, bringing the story once more to the viewer as a modern interpretation that the current generation can relate to.

All praises being given to the original it does have to be said, if a modern day viewer saw this 70’s flick, their reaction would be nothing like it was back then. It unfortunately falls under those trend-setting categories where much of what was original back then has been beaten repeatedly by consequent films to a pulp since then. A good comparison I would say is the bullet-time we all were so amazed by back when the Matrix was released a few years back. It was amazing, and then it was seen everywhere, Scary Movie, even Bollywood got its share of spoofing it in Main Hoon Na (I’m Here Aren’t I?).

So in my personal opinion, it made total sense for this remake to be done, but a straight up remake wouldn’t cut it, it would need modernising. – It occurs to me I haven’t really said what this flick is all about yet so I’ll cover that before going into comparisons & details that will otherwise make little to no sense to you.

The synopsis (of both):
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Details still being written & re-written ...