Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "The Battle of Saragarhi, one of the greatest \"last stands\" in history" video.

I wonder, which of these many stories you have told, would you choose to have made into a movie? See it as one of those, “If I could wave a magic wand,” questions, perhaps? If you could choose any director, actors, script writers, etc, alive or dead? I ask, because I saw this story play out like a movie in my head as you were telling it. And I wondered about the motives and character of these heroes who knowingly chose to die for the sake of their comrades, and for a foreign imperial power. Their collective choice certainly challenges a lot of received thinking about, “empire,” and could be interrogated through some really compelling characters through the medium of film, whilst being something rather novel to western cinema. We don’t get many Sikh heroes in western war epics. They are as deserving of memorialising on the silver screen as were the Three Hundred of Thermopylae, if less sensationally than they would be in the hands of Zack Snyder. Where is David Lean when you need him?
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I apologise if this sounds a bit callous but that story would make for a wonderful movie. I find that most of your tales would in one way or another. But this would make for an action epic of the type that David Lean once did so well. Not just for the thrilling action and heroism but, in the right hands, and with a well enough written script, an exploration of the motives and emotions of the heroes who held that fort. An interrogation of the loyalty that would motivate these people to knowingly choose to fight to the death for the sake of their foreign, imperial masters. There’s a real chance to explore the complexities of the notion of, “empire,” in terms of its positives and negatives and perhaps challenge some of the received thinking that so many attach to it. And a chance to write some truly compelling characters; a, “new,” type of hero, not often seen in western cinema.
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