Given the perduring distance between Bollywood and Hollywood, two of the largest and most prolific film industries in the world, the recent release of the Bollywood film Koi Mil Gaya, loosely based on Steven Spielberg's science fiction classic, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, provides an excellent opportunity to compare this most current of Bollywood products to the original, a classic of contemporary American cinema, re-edited and re-released on its 20th anniversary last year. What is striking about the comparison is how different the films manage to be, despite sharing all essential plot elements. Placing these two versions of one story side by side thus helps elucidate the different tropes through which Hollywood and Bollywood succeed in capturing popular desire (and making a buck off it) and in particular, the heroes they construct to do so. The bittersweet paths we see boys take to become men in both E.T. and Koi Mil Gaya express more than anything the anxieties which underlie the norms of adult manhood in both contexts. It is these anxieties which the films work to release, by resurrecting the ancient hope of the hero who can overcome the dreadful binds we all fear to be caught in.
It is indeed a testament to the imagination of Koi Mil Gaya's film makers that they could take such highly atypical material – a science fiction tale of an abandoned alien and the lonely boy who helps him make contact with his home world – and Bollywoodize it. And Bollywoodize they did! Adding a romantic story line, six songs, an hour to the plot-line, and an ending that thankfully did not involve flying bicycles, motorbikes, or pedal scooters (as it easily might have), but did involve a certain volume of tears shed, a space ship landing and taking off, and the reassurance from our alien friend that "he would be there, watching over" our hero forever, Koi Mil Gaya is nonetheless a profoundly different film from the original. While both movies tell a story about childhood, families, and bridging these, about the struggle to be a man, they reveal very different children, families and men. Both are designed as family entertainment, which distinguishes them from other blockbusters of male adventure. Not only do they include women in major roles, but they show us heroism at its sweetest, i.e., when performed by boys, who we are supposed to love for their innocence and vulnerability as much as for their power. The sweetness of the boy is what excuses the violence of the man he becomes; it is what marks out our heroes as heroes in the first place. The emotional requirements of the central figures is what motivates their friendships with the aliens in both films, and it is this relationship which then forces them to act within a world which opposes and threatens it.
Both films are thus coming-of-age stories marked by a certain nostalgia for boyhood and its mysteries, even if in both films, growing up is marked by loss as well as gain. But this trajectory is presented as inescapable. The hero must save his alien – and willingly participate in his own separation from what he loves – or else his newfound friend will die. Adulthood thus makes irrefutable demands. One of these demands is the self-sacrifice of love, an interesting metaphor for manhood. The films thus conscript us into the grand adventure of becoming a man but they place, at its centre, a wound. Koi Mil Gaya nonetheless ameliorates that wound with an entire social realm and the possibilities of manhood – love and family and power – whereas E.T. concludes only with its young hero's tear-streaked face, looking up at the stars. This makes one movie a triumph and the other a tragedy, even if neither entirely and without ambivalence.
The plots centre on a family which has lost its father and the boy who has to struggle with this absence. In E.T., the boy, Elliott, played by Henry Thomas, is a very ordinary kid: a prepubescent middle son, overshadowed by his older brother, solicitous towards his younger sister and distant from his mother in the absence of his dad. In Koi Mil Gaya, on the other hand, the hero, Rohit, played by Hrithik Roshan (the son of the director, Rakesh Roshan, who also plays his father), is instead a man-child, forever stunted mentally by the accident which saw his father's death and which resulted directly from an earlier visit of the alien spaceship to Earth. He is a large man, if skinny, and for the first half of the film the contrast between his size and those of his classmates and compatriots is highlighted to great effect. If the pathos here is visually written in the contrast between Rohit's largeness and his childish clothes, behaviour, possessions, the pathos of the original is Elliott's smallness. Elliott is constantly being placed in adult situations and practices he is not quite ready for – getting drunk, kissing a girl, directing the van his brother Mike drives to get E.T. away from his captors, the state scientists. It is the charm of his size which makes these adventures so appealing, a common theme in American movies and one of the reasons child actors have such difficulty when they grow up. The cinema finds touching the figure of the child too wise for its years, signalling perhaps recognition on the part of Hollywood's filmmakers of how immature and incapable even the largest can feel in industrial society. Whereas in Koi Mil Gaya, Rohit captures the spoils of victory with the tools of youth and with the help of his youthful compatriots but he is always, visually, a man doing so. While E.T. speaks of the necessity of growing up, fast, Koi Mil Gaya resurrects the possibility of the boy in the heart of the man, even, by the end of the movie, in the bulgingly muscled, tight-pants-wearing sex symbol, Hrithik Roshan.