Tanda Putera; A Prejudiced View Of History.

KUALA LUMPUR: After a week Tanda Putera premiered in the cinemas and having received more criticism than a blockbuster hit, finally I was tasked to watch Shuhaimi Baba's film and see for myself how worthy is the movie that some say it deserves academic acknowledgement.
 Highlighting on the story of the friendship of Tun Abdul Razak and his then deputy Tun Dr Ismail, which was played by Rusdi Ramli and Zizan Nin respectively, Tanda Putera, to sum it up was a poor attempt of what had happened around the time of the May 1969 riot and how it was resolved.
 Despite the cost amounting up to RM5 million, Tanda Putera appeared poorly written and disorganized. It somehow lacked flow and connection in its storyline, lack of background research, wrong casting and in short, a complete shipwreck.
 On top of that, the movie has a biased and unbalanced view of history, whereby the Malays were put under good light and glorified while the Chinese was portrayed as inciting racial hatred against the Malays and had been infiltrated by the Communist.
 In the first half hour of the two-hour movie, the Chinese and Democratic Action Party (DAP) were shown from the very beginning as radical rebels; from protesting against the elections result to shooting police officers, except for one Chinese university student Allen, played by Alan Yun and his father, who were the only good apple among all the other Chinese represented in the movie.
 While the Chinese received most of the bad light, it had not at all mention on the Malayan Communist party, which had Malays in their groups as well. As for MCA, the movie had easily passed the party member as a coward, not only by not showing the party's role, but also for quitting the alliance when things had turned ugly.
 Though the film showed the cooperation between Razak and Ismail and how they resolved the racial issues after the 1969 riot, if one was not familiar with the history, it could have easily been perceived that the 1971 Kuala Lumpur flood was what brought races together.
 What was meant to highlight on their achievements and how they had put aside their personal health problems for the better of their country, Tanda Putera seemed to be more on our seemingly fragile leaders whose illness was emphasized too much over their major contributions.
 As for the casting, Shuhaimi should have known that gone were the days where mothers look just as youthful as their teenage sons and daughters, and this goes for both Razak and Ismail’s wives, played by Faezah Elai and Linda Hashim respectively.
 Too many miscasts and tummy-wrenching acting were jumbled up in the horrible mash-up of flashbacks that were not even worth mentioning at this point. While there are some fictional characters to bring color to the movie, the only worth giving credit for was the stenographer Jah, played by Ida Nerina, while the other characters weren't even necessary and brought more confusion than color to it. For an experienced director like Shuhaimi herself, Tanda Putera was a disappointment.
 Little attention was given to small details which could have brought great differences to the representation of history. For instance, the university students dress-up almost made it seemed like it was in the current times rather than in the early 70s.
 The characters had rebonded straight hair and one even had obvious-dyed golden hair, police officials kept getting shot on the same spot in the same street and in the same car, and election posters looked like they were printed by ink-jet printers on crispy white papers.
 Such lack of research and effort showed a lazy attempt, giving the movie an unfinished cut and badly represented production. It is true most movies based on true events can be both factual and fictional at the same time, whereby fiction were used to bring drama to the event, after all, it is still entertainment.
 But when a movie is produced in such a poorly and prejudiced manner, it brings great disappointment to moviegoers. All in all, not only that Tanda Putera was not at all entertaining (although somewhat tear-jerking), but the movie was not even educational, focusing too much on unnecessary details while lacking on others.
 How the Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Department thought it could be an academic study material is a great wonder. In the end, Tanda Putera may not be a must-watch movie, but it is a great lesson for those who wished to see the level of improvements in our entertainment scene and also to proof a point to the government that the society is no longer easily swayed.