THE RAILWAY MEN

NetFlix 2023

It is a drama/almost horror about how the railway men of the city of Bhopal helped save many lives when the pesticide plant of American multinational Union-Carbide exploded and leaked.

For the first half hour is the scene setting, don’t worry you will get your gore and and Valve’s ‘Left For Dead’ style helpless civilians running around feeling helpless and general dying.

It is not all death and damage. You do generally like and empathise with the Railway men and people who are also in the middle of this dreadful situation, and I cannot strongly say that something very like this happened. There was a disaster of this scale in Bhopal that caused the railwaymen and civilians of the city to suffer unimaginable suffering.

Did I like it?

I loved it. However, it was influenced by zombie computer games such as the Left For Dead series, showing my age here. I would have loved it even more if it had been less ‘computer-gamey’.

I liked it so much that I watched it in one sitting. The length of the show was 4 x 50minutes. I was also elated when help arrived

Also the plot built up slowly. It didn’t do that NetFlix irratating thing of having the first episode establish the final goal and then having each episode have a distraction but getting no further from the final objective. New objectives and plot growth happened in this series.

Maybe a ‘true-ish’ story helped the authors to keep to the discipline of this story