Vastly different place

Rating: 7/10 (25 November 2008)

It doesn't make sense that someone who succeeds on a game show (the Millionaire show) would succumb to beatings, torture and treatment as though he is a worthless dog due to suspicions of cheating. After all could not this person simply have been lucky in guessing the multiple choice questions correctly. We quickly realize how different things can be in a land different than our own.
We do get a sense of the vastness of the country and how different it is than the west. Not only do we get this sense from the shocking way people are treated just from being of a lower class and from scenes of unfathomable squalor, but simply from the questions that are asked on the Millionaire show. When the basic, low value questions will be so obscurely vague to us if we are westerners, but are so rudimentary for Indians, and the hardest most obscure and highest value questions for the Indians are not that difficult for us, we realize the individuality of the country's culture, history and society. When a whole other world of a billion plus people can be obsessed by this person who might win it all, and we would never hear of him, we really feel the largeness of the world and how small we are in comparison.
It is fast paced, lots of running and action packed. It seems a bit artificial as cheap thrills and raw entertainment took precedence over realism and a true immersion.
The story could have simply been about life on the streets in India and what growing up was like for these "slum dogs". The cut to the millionaire aspects seems a bit gimmicky and almost oddly thrown in to make the movie more entertaining. It probably was more entertainment and crowd pleasing as a result of the Millionaire Show parts, but it did not create a more fulfilling cultural experience, as the best foreign films can be.