Introduction
I’m not a film critic.
I’m a student of neuroscience, psychology, storytelling, and human behaviour. So rather than evaluating the film as cinema, I found myself asking a different question:
Why did it connect so strongly with audiences?
Action sequences, visual effects, marketing campaigns, or star power alone can’t explain its success. Those elements may attract attention, but they don’t fully explain why millions of people become emotionally invested in a story.
The more interesting answer may lie in how effectively the film engaged the human mind.
The brain is wired for stories
From the science of storytelling, the film understood a timeless truth:
People don’t remember information — they remember stories.
Human beings have been using stories to transmit knowledge, values, and cultural identity for thousands of years. Stories provide structure to experience and help us make sense of a complex world.
The film presented audiences with familiar narrative ingredients: conflict, sacrifice, patriotism, uncertainty, and a larger sense of purpose. These weren’t merely plot devices. They were psychological mechanisms that encouraged emotional investment.
Viewers weren’t simply watching events unfold. They were experiencing a narrative journey.
Identity: The psychology beneath the narrative
The psychology of identity played an equally important role.
Since 1947, the India-Pakistan relationship has occupied a significant place in the collective memory of the subcontinent. Decades of historical, political, and cultural narratives already existed within the minds of audiences before they entered the theatre.
The film inherited this emotional context.
In doing so, it activated one of humanity’s oldest psychological frameworks:
Us versus Them.
Social psychologists have long observed that individuals derive part of their identity from the groups to which they belong. When a story engages national identity, collective memory, or shared values, audiences often experience events on screen as personally meaningful rather than merely entertaining.
Attention: The most valuable resource
In neuroscience, attention is often described as a limited resource.
Successful films understand this intuitively.
Through escalating stakes, suspense, uncertainty, and emotional tension, the narrative continually rewarded curiosity. Every new challenge encouraged audiences to keep asking:
What happens next?
What particularly stood out was the audio design.
Music, sound effects, pacing, rhythm, and even silence weren’t simply supporting the visuals. They were actively directing attention and shaping emotional responses.
The result was an experience that maintained engagement at both cognitive and emotional levels.
Emotion and Memory: Why do some stories stay with us?
The architecture of memory offers another explanation.
Neuroscience research suggests that emotionally significant experiences are remembered far better than emotionally neutral ones. Emotional arousal influences memory consolidation, making certain moments more likely to remain accessible long after the experience ends.
The film repeatedly leveraged powerful emotional themes:
- Patriotism
- Danger
- Sacrifice
- Triumph
- Loss
- Duty
These themes acted as memory anchors, increasing the likelihood that audiences would continue thinking about the story after leaving the theatre.
In simple terms, people often remember what made them feel something.
The power of worldbuilding
The film’s worldbuilding deserves equal credit.
It created a believable universe of intelligence networks, covert operations, strategic decision-making, and geopolitical tensions.
Effective worldbuilding does more than provide a backdrop for action. It creates psychological immersion.
Audiences weren’t merely observing characters. They were entering a world with its own rules, risks, and realities.
The stronger the immersion, the stronger the emotional investment.
The archetypes and anthropology of imagination
Another fascinating dimension lies in the anthropology of imagination.
Across cultures and civilizations, certain character patterns appear repeatedly in myths, legends, epics, and folklore.
The film drew upon several enduring archetypes:
- The Warrior
- The Protector
- The Mission
- The Defence of One’s People
These archetypes continue to resonate because they reflect recurring themes within human culture and psychology.
Long before modern cinema existed, societies were telling versions of these stories around campfires, in temples, through poetry, and in epic literature.
The medium changes.
The underlying psychological patterns remain remarkably consistent.
So, is it great cinema?
Not necessarily.
One could argue that the film is a fairly conventional commercial masala entertainer.
Yet that’s precisely what makes its success so interesting.
Its effectiveness may not stem from cinematic innovation alone. Rather, it emerges from how successfully it engages core psychological mechanisms that shape human experience.
Whether these principles were applied consciously or unconsciously, the film managed to activate storytelling, identity, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion simultaneously.
And that’s no small achievement.
Conclusion
Technology creates spectacle.
Psychology creates connection.
As filmmaking increasingly embraces AI, virtual production, immersive media, and emerging AVGC-XR technologies, technical mastery will remain important. But understanding how the human mind processes stories, emotions, identities, and memories may be equally valuable.
The future of entertainment won’t belong solely to those who build better tools.
It may belong to those who better understand the minds experiencing them.