In the Laos mountains, a woman named Mali (Alice Keohavong) gives birth to twins, but one is stillborn. When twins are born the natives believe one is blessed but the other cursed, and so Mali's mother-in-law Taitok (Bunsri Yindi) insists the surviving twin be killed, but Mali successfully intervenes and spares him, keeping this a secret from her husband Toma (Sumrit Warin) with Taitok's help. Seven years later, the surviving twin, Ahlo (Sitthiphon Dissamoe), remains stigmatised in his community as a cursed child and his village is now levelled to make way for the construction of a new dam. Seeing an opportunity to make a difference and now improve his reputation, Ahlo now tries to lead his family and friends on a perilous trek to find a new home, participating en route in a rocket-flying festival to prove to them all he is not cursed after all.
Writer-director Kim Maurant's The Rocket was Australia's entry for the 2013 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar but it wasn't nominated and frankly, I understand why. Its intentions and spirit are great, and Maurant deserves kudos for seeking to focus on a culture very rarely explored in Western cinema, but his film was, for me, ultimately very insipid, shallow and even rather insincere. The Laotian landscape is filmed beautifully and the distrusted outsider theme is a profound and resonant one, but it's also a rather hackneyed one today and Maurant doesn't even try to explore it with any freshness or personal insight here. The performances are all reasonable but none of the cast really have anything meaty to work with, the pacing is very inconsistent and most prominently, Caitlin Yeo's score feels much too conventional and European where I would've far preferred a strongly Asian soundtrack.
Some rockets explode, and some fizz out. For me, this one did the latter.
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