Rating: 
One of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It’s just about perfect. What stuck me above everything else was the pulsating, riveting soundtrack. As if the gripping imagery of the slums of Mumbai wasn’t enough, the head pounding indian music that accompanies it throws you into the perfect mood to carry you through the movie with a deep compassion for Salim and Jamal for withstanding such an intense, harsh childhood… it acts to instantly uproot you from comfy, rich America and put you right in the heart of India.
The story line is an unbeliveable, albiet creative and fun idea. A “slumdog” that nobody can believe would actually advance to the million rupee point on India’s “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” has to prove he isn’t cheating by re-telling most of his life and how he knows the answers to the police. He only went on the show in the first place because he knew his lost love would be watching… he wasn’t even interested in the money, despite growing up in abject poverty – traveling as an orphan all over India; begging for money and finding food in garbage dumps and even being abducted by a child slave owner for a time.
What Jamal overcomes just to find and rescue his childhood love is heroic and spectacular… and this movie serves also as a remarkable expose of the poverty in India despite the growing wealth of the country and it’s upper class, and the hope of the slumdogs to one day prosper.
When I returned home from this movie the first thing I did was research Mumbai and how we can all help the people in extreme poverty there. Turns out the Indian government is already hard at work in doing so, since India’s wealth is growing and they want to make Mumbai, the largest city, a more acceptable business destination. What they’re going to do with the millions that live there, I’m not sure – but all the slums are planned to be demolished by the government and in there place they are building low-rent apartment housing, apparently. Hopefully most of the slum dwellers can afford these places – for those that can’t let’s pray that India has a plan for them…
You can find out more about the situation in Mumbai at this amazing website – where you can even hear interviews from families that live in the slums.