Carbon: A Story of Tomorrow (2017) User Reviews

Interesting premise, decent acting, all in all a success

[Horst_In_Translation · 6/10 · 11 September 2018]

"Carbon: A Story of Tomorrow" is (despite the title) an Indian Hindi-language short film from 2017 and this is a science fiction movie and this genre and India is something you would not initially make a connection between these two, but Maitrey Bajpai and Ramiz Ilham Khan here show everybody how it's done and I hope their 25-minute movie here inspires other Indian filmmakers to give it a go. I am especially surprised I liked this quite a bit because I am not that much of a fan of Indian movies (except The Lunchbox) and science fiction is definitely among my least favorite genres, but the approach they gave it here reminded me a bit of the Oscar-winning movie Ex Machina at times and it's not considerably worse. The idea of oxygene being a really important and expensive good, a drug even, is good enough for the basic setting as this film takes us way into the future. Simple, yet intriguing. The lead actor has nice charisma and screen presence too and the acting itself is not too bad I would say either, actually fairly decent by everybody involved. The robot reference involving one central character was included with nice focus as well. Yes maybe the film takes itself a bit more seriously when it starts elaborating on refugees and the Gandhi quote near the end in terms of inspiring out generation to shape the future in a way where they are happy to get this world from us was honorable, but yeah a bit exaggerated too I'm afraid. Nonetheless, this does not take away from the entertainment factor. This film is a decent success in terms of script and performance, but also in terms of technical aspects like effects and sound, but also visual aspects like costumes and set decorations. I am indeed a bit surprised how well this turned given how little experience India has with the science fiction genre. So yeah, go see this one. Most likely, you will not regret the watch here.

It's sad that this has a rating of 6.6 while Padmavat is 7.3 on imdb (as of this writing)

[perlshop · 8/10 · 11 February 2018]

A very common complaint among people who admire sci-fi movies like Her, Gattaca, Interstellar, Contact, etc is that Bollywood or India doesn't make any sci-fi movies. So to me it was one of the better things to come out of India cinema and I'm happy to see that at least people are finally experimenting with sci-fi genre.

Maybe one or two things could have been better (like the ending or cgi) but this movie also got a lot of things right.. like for starters, no simplistic dialogues like Krish or stupid characters like Jaadu. Thanks for assuming your audience has some IQ and not dumbing down everything (my biggest gripe with indian sci-fi).

Good to see an experimental sci-fi movie made in India, that too with a message

[amit1717 · 8/10 · 2 September 2017]

Sci-fi movies made in India are a rare genre, and many duds and flops later, no one is even willing to experiment in this genre anymore. So this short film is definitely a great experiment. The plus being that it comes with a really important message, which affects everyone's lives today and tomorrow - Pollution.

The film is set in a dystopian future of 2067, where oxygen has become so scarce that it has become the new and the most expensive drug of the town, whose price is only comparable with another drug, water. Random, a guy with an artificial heart is the dealer of this drug and he wishes to become rich and finally escape to Mars, where apparently all the rich people have flown off to.

For a short film, the visuals are really great. The acting is good, Jackky Bhagnani was good in his role as Random, Nawazuddin, Prachi Desai and Yashpal Sharma were good in their minimal roles. The story is quite simplistic and straightforward but the message delivered is the most important aspect of the film.