Shoorveer, a strictly middling aviation thriller that never quite soars

2022 has been the year of Tom Cruise and Top Gun. A couple of years ago people were worried that Marvel’s dominance was leading us all down the monoculture path, with no prisoners taken or dissent tolerated. But Top Gun: Maverick’s record-breaking box office performance and all-round blockbuster goodness has meant that we are all in love with the old-fashioned, big-budget Hollywood tentpole once again. Cruise has also reminded us that the appeal of fighter pilots is irresistible to pacifists and military buffs alike.

It's in this favourable cultural landscape that Disney+ Hotstar’s new aviation thriller Shoorveer has been released. Created by Samar Khan with all episodes directed by Kanishka Varma, Shoorveer follows the inception and exploits of the newly-minted Hawks, an elite first-responders task force consisting of officers from all three branches of the armed forces — but really, it’s the Air Force that is centred in the narrative.

After a home soil ambush by terrorists leaves the Indian government red-faced, NIA chief Milind Phanse (Makarand Paranjape) asks Group Commander Ranjan Malik (Manish Choudhary) to form and lead the Hawks, even as the show delivers ominous prologue scenes to show the audience that the next terrorist attack is just around the corner.

These first few episodes can be fun, occasionally. The characters of Squadron Leader Viraj Sehgal (Armaan Raihan) and Squadron Leader Salim Kamali (Adil Khan) are clearly modelled after the Maverick-Iceman frenemy equation from the original Top Gun, where these two roles were played by Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, respectively. At one point, Viraj is even called ‘Maverick’ by Salim, albeit in a sarcastic way. Raihan and Khan put in diligent performances, although both of their characters are somewhat single-note.

Regina Cassandra’s character Avantika Rao, however, gets the best story arc out of all the Hawks — although she is introduced with a very trite line (“Mig udaane waalon ka swag hi alag hotaa hai”). We go on to learn that her husband, who was also a fighter pilot, died in a crash that was ultimately blamed on pilot error. Viraj, however, feels there’s more there than meets the eye and he sets off on a dangerous plan of action to prove that the JT-18, the plane involved in the crash, has a technical snag that makes it unpredictable at speeds over Mach 2.

It's here that I feel Shoorveer’s wings are clipped. One gets the feeling that the writers were not very sure how much of the eight-episode-runtime they could safely devote to the JT-18 storyline—and how much space and time would that leave them for the counter-terrorism plot, which was after all the raison d’etre of both the Hawks and this show on the whole. As a result, the pacing is wildly uneven. Things move along at quite a leisurely pace for the first half of the season, before absolutely motoring along in the final few episodes, where too many story strands are being resolved at the same time.

The aviation sequences range from the pretty good to the absolutely tacky, which is another problem for Shoorveer. You can see that the tech needed for these scenes is somewhat unfamiliar for the director and perhaps even the visual effects team. The final result, therefore, is like a musician learning a new instrument—because of their training, they can play a few lines okay, but the specifics of the new instrument trip them up every now and then.

This is the kind of show where wildly implausible lines of dialogue are often followed by add-ons like “It’s the only way!” or “This is our only chance!” as though acknowledging the silliness of the preceding lines. But a certain amount of latitude is par for the course here, I suppose, because even the most cinema verité military dramas have a great deal of pure hooey passed off as real-life military strategies (this includes the Top Gun movies, by the way).

Another irritant: cringeworthy attempts to praise India’s incumbent central government and its pet schemes. I saw no reason, for example, to shoehorn ‘Make in India’ references here, no reason at all. It’s the kind of thing that was clearly added on in post-production, probably at the behest of some production house bigwig. Another scene uses the word ‘Vishwaguru’ in an entirely wrong, dissonant context, for no other reason than to allude to Prime Minister Modi’s usage of the same word. There is nothing wrong per se in real-life political linkages in TV shows, but they must be done in a way that feels true to the story—not like this, where they have clearly been added in a self-conscious manner to satisfy somebody’s agenda.

Shoorveer manages to be escapist fun for a few episodes, but loses steam fairly quickly to end up as another middling, by-the-book counter-terrorism story, the kind Hotstar already has in the form of Special Ops.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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