Slumdog Millionaire - Movie Review Example

Movie Review: Slumdog Millionaire In the movie Slumdog Millionaire, the focus was upon the plight of the desperately poor children living in India. However, the movie also had a compare and contrast element to it, in that, in the first part of the movie, the children were living in Bombay. By the end of the movie, after Jamal, Salim and Latika were young adults, Bombay had become Mumbai. Therefore, the contrast was between how the desperately poor children lived in Bombay, which was pre-modernity and pre-industrialization, compared to how they lived in Mumbai, which was post-modernity and post-industrialization.

The plight was similar in both situations – the poor remained desperately poor – but how they actually eked out a living changed considerably. The three characters in this movie were Jamal, his brother Salim, and Latika. Jamal and Salim are orphans – their mother was killed during a raid on Muslim people, and Latika was a waif who happened upon the boys’ camp, and they took her in. During the first part of the movie, they were shown making a living by dealing with trash, trying to find things to sell.

A man named Maman finds the boys and tricks them into working for him. Maman’s plan was to recruit young boys to learn how to sing, then he blinds them, as blind singers earn more money begging than non-blind singers do. They escape from Maman, and they eke out a living by pretending to be tour guides for the Taj Mahal and picking pockets. This was how the first part of the movie was portrayed – the boys lived on the streets and stayed fed and clothed by acting like one would imagine a street urchin would act.

One of the boys who was blinded by Maman was later seen singing in a subway tunnel. Salim and Jamal earned a living by selling things that they found in the trash or by conning people. However, this was when Mumbai was still Bombay. Bombay turned into Mumbai, and the difference in the overall landscape was striking. This was made clear in a scene where Salim and Jamal are atop a skyscraper that was in the process of being built. Salim said to Jamal that all that they were seeing – the modernity of the great city, with gleaming skyscrapers and a thriving business district – was on the site where they once grew up in the slums.

This was meant to denote that the city had changed considerably since Jamal and Salim were boys. And, with the change from Bombay into Mumbai, came a change in how the boys earned their money. Jamal, for his part, was able to make money legitimately by being a part of a call center that answered calls from around the world. This was definitely a job for the modern era, as it was globalization that made this particular job a reality for Indian people. Globalization made it possible, because companies were able to outsource their customer service jobs and other call service jobs to India and other places around the world.

Globalization was also presumably what made Mumbai such a central focus for goods and services, and how Bombay was able to turn into Mumbai. Salim’s job was different too – he became a part of a powerful crime syndicate that was headed by Javed, who had virtually enslaved Latika. Thus, the movie effectively was able to compare and contrast how a city changed due to globalization, and how the lives of the poor in India changed with it. Jamal was no longer a desperate beggar who had to resort to illegitimate means to make money – he had a semi-respectable job as a Chai server in a call center.

This was made possible by globalization. Salim’s job as a gangster’s assistant was also different than the opportunities that would’ve been offered to him when Mumbai was Bombay. The underlying message was that the crime syndicate that he was involved with was powerful in part because of the modernity of the city, and the fact that the city was, on a whole, much richer than before. The boys were still poor – they still slept on a mattress that was on the floor of an abandoned building – but they no longer were street kids.

They were working – one legitimately one illegitimately – and their jobs were different because of modernity. That was one of the messages of the movie.