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Stylish but barely mediocre overall

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

The first must-see film of the year.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

A viewer would do tremendous justice to "The Rocket" by describing it as a film loaded with joyful entertainment albeit coupled with an earnest message. The film begins in a shocking manner as viewers are shown how during a delivery of twins, one of the baby dies. At a latter stage, the boy who has survived death is censured for having taken his mother's life in a freak accident. This incident points to numerous illogical acts of superstitions which continue to prevail in many countries. According to them, a person is directly or indirectly responsible for the life or the death of another person. 'The Rocket' starts as a drama but quickly transforms itself into a comedy with a message. It makes a lot of sense to viewers who want to know about the handling of serious issues in films as one gets a frank view of what happens when people are displaced due to the construction of dams. What makes "The Rocket" special for adults is that this film is able to strike a perfect chord with young children and teenage viewers.It shows them why the world of children is highly unpredictable as it cannot be fully understood by adults.

Does this film seriously contain a line of dialogue where a dirty brown person looks at a clean toilet given to him by a well-dressed, clean white man and then make an argument that he'd rather go back to pooping on the dirt?Yes. Yes, it does.I understand that white guilt is great for getting award nominations and then winning some of those awards, but The Rocket is the most sickening type of poverty porn film out there. The film goes out of it's way to paint the Lao as underdeveloped savages, while at the same time blaming the loss of their simple, noble life on white people. The film plays like a 'greatest hits' list of third world oppression, that the directors seems to have pulled from the first page Google results of a search for 'Problems with Laos'. UXO's? Check. Village relocation due to encroaching Australian hydro-power projects? Check. Corrupt government officials ruling the peasants through bribery and strong-arm violence? Check.The problem is, while these are probably real problems in Laos, the film's need to hit every point on the list during it's 90 minute runtime only serves to trivialize the reality of what's probably happening in Laos. It's hard to believe that one little boy would have his life uprooted by an infrastructure development, only to be blown up several times by old bombs. In the end, the entire film feels like the director just wants you to CARE SO MUCH about all the problems that the Western world has brought to these poor brown, ground poopers... But he jumps from subject to subject so quickly that he glosses over any sort of complexity that might help any audience member to actually have anything less than the superficial understanding the director things will make a tear come to your eye.He's found the heartstrings, and he just haphazardly plucks away. It's almost like after running that first Google search for 'Problems with Laos', Mordaunt Googled, 'How to manipulate festival judges into awarding your film prizes by exploiting poor people.' Hopefully, Mordaunt will make The Rocket 2, and he can film a Lao child covered in flies.

Trekking through the dangerous jungles of Laos, 10-year old Ahlo (Sitthiphon Disamoe) is determined to convince his superstitious family that he is not a lightning rod for bad luck.Blessed with a nutty uncle obsessed with James Brown (Thep Phongam) and caught in the middle of a village relocation program over the building of a dam, Ahlo's eventful journey takes him through the scarred landscape of his home, littered with Vietnam-era bombs that are still waiting to go off.Australian writer/director Kim Mordaunt was inspired to make this wistful, often lyrical film after his 2007 documentary Bomb Harvest, which told of the annual toll claimed by the unexploded bombs in Laos.Thankfully he layers the unavoidable political notes with real warmth, humour and character, a quality that clearly benefited from using a mix of professional and non-professional actors. Mordaunt also knows how to use irony without pushing it; as Ahlo aims to prove his worth at a big rocket festival, we're reminded that The Rocket is not a political allegory, it's an offbeat, celebratory coming-of-age story about a kid.

I saw The Rocket at a film festival just yesterday. I was impressed by the two young leads who convey as much from their faces as what is said. An early sequence where the boy - Ahlo swims underwater in a large dam past sunken statues conveys much about the trade off between the hydro schemes and the forced relocation of villagers in the way. These dams flood hundreds of square kilometres and provide the context for this story in which Ahlo's family is forced to relocate. These large dams including the Xayaburi Dam ( in progress) will affect the lives of more than 60m people in the region and looks to be an environmental disaster in the making. Wisely the story focuses on the 2 children but the politics in Laos deserve more scrutiny. The other key part of this story is that Laos was the most bombed country in the world with more than 75m unexploded bombs ( out of 260m dropped) still buried or half buried there as a result of the Vietnam war. These bombs are referred to as "sleeping tigers" in the film and are a very real constraint on the health and safety of the local people.A secondary theme in the film explores in part the Hmong minority. It is not clear in the film but it looks like Uncle Purple may have been part of that conflict. While we discover more about Uncle Purple in the film that story is only sketched out.What makes this film great is the 2 young leads , Ahlo and Kia who despite all of the disruption around them manage to have wonderful moments in the markets and at the Rocket Festival.I saw this at a film festival and the director said they had based the film in part upon a documentary called Bomb Harvest which he had made earlier. They also attended an actual rocket festival and recreated that for the film. They wanted to give insights from the Laotian point of view which they succeeded on despite this being an Australian film project. The Rocket mixes real life in Laos today with hope for the future. I would see it again for sure.