Zinda is a 2006 Bollywood thriller starring Sanjay Dutt, John Abraham, Mahesh Manjrekar, Celina Jaitley and Lara Dutta. The movie has been freely adapted from the movie Oldboy, and the storyline of Zinda closely parallels that of Oldboy. Zinda has been directed by Sanjay Gupta, who previously directed Sanjay Dutt in the 2004 movie Musafir.
The writing credits for this movie have been shared between Sanjay Gupta and Suresh Nair.
The movie was released in Indian cinema theatres on the 23rd of December 2005.
One good act of vengeance.... deserves another
Oldboy Producers ShowEast talked with the press,saying that the only remake rights contract they ever signed was with Universal in the US, and with no one else, including India. The company announced that after looking at the finished product they will make their decision, which might have legal ramifications, if the film is as similar to Park Chan-Wook's hit as has been claimed.
A PR from Show East announced: "We're looking at the similarities between the two films, but since we don't have a final product we can judge, we'll just have to investigate a little more into what kind of relation the films will have. Since we never experienced something like this, we couldn't really set up a concrete plan. But if we find out there's indeed a strong similarity between the two, it looks like we'll have to talk with our lawyers."
Contrary to the expectations, Zinda has not been copied verbatim from Oldboy. Director Sanjay Gupta has altered the track of Incest in the original between the Woo-jin (Rohit Chopra played by John Abraham in Zinda) and his sister to one where the lead protagonist Dae-Su (Sanjay Dutt as Balajeet Roy ) simply claims to his friends to have had sex with her to win a bet. This eventually leads to the girl dying in a fire after her schoolmates brand her a whore and hound her. The change in plot gels well with Indian sensibilities. Similarly the revenge too does not involve incest but deflowering of Sanjay Dutt's daughter. Finally Rohit lets her go with out the act thus acting easy on viewer's sensibilities. The character of Mi-do, daughter of Dae Su in the original, has been retained as Jenny Singh (Lara Dutta) but unrelated to Balajeet. Hence, the film will not face much resistance from the Indian "Moral Police" as the activist cells of certain political parties in India are colloquially known. Fairly recent example of such policing was the hullaballoo created over films like Girlfriend and Deepa Mehta's Fire which dealt with the relatively tender subject of lesbianism in modern India.
The music for the movie has been composed by the popular Bollywood music-director duo Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani (as Vishal-Shekhar). |
