Bollywood Films Inspiration Or Plagiarism: Go Goa Gone And Zombieland

Plots get old. But borrowing intensely from Hollywood never gets old in the good ol’ land of Bollywood! Here’s a true case, a recent one so that you don’t have to try too hard to remember.  Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K’s directorial Go Goa Gone bears blunt resemblances to the 2009 movie Zombieland, a Ruben Fleischer project starring the Adventureland boy Jesse Eisenberg. But it will not be fair to just talk of Zombieland the 2009 movie, but also the TV series that has premiered this year in the 19^th of April in the USA.

Hollywood, this is talking about complete American hegemony, has always been preoccupied with the “walking deads”. Oh, that will remind you of a TV series that is currently on air in India, The Walking Dead.  Both Go Goa Gone and Zombieland project the idea of strangers coming together to save the day from Zombies. There is also the “good boy” factor that matches, that is, in both the films there is this character that helps the central characters come together at the zombie-infested point, for instance, Bunny in case of Go Goa Gone. 

It, however, is hard to just talk of Go Goa Gone as bearing resemblance to a single movie of this script-line. Remember 28 Days Later? This Danny Boyle movie based in the UK, centers its plot around a mystery virus that results in mass carnage? Well after you’ve seen Go Goa Gone, it will give you a déjà vu feel just to seek the similarities of a medical fiasco, in the Bollywood case, a strange drug. While discussing such science – gone – wrong mess, we can also talk of The Invasion, a 2007 Oliver Heirschbiegl movie that too spoke of an alien epidemic, however not on zombie lines, but more on the Stephanie Meyer novel The Host lines. The Invasion starred Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. The Host was released on March 2013 in the movie format under directions by Andrew Niccol.

To sum it up, you might find Go Goa Gone a crude and sad attempt at popularizing the zombie flicks in India. Funny or not, one wonders why such deadbeat, stale, almost overused concepts must be borrowed from Hollywood when Bollywood caters to a diverse land of over 1.21 billion folks?

For an avid foreign film buff, Go Goa Gone is a master-copy just for the large number of sources it copied from and yet managing to emit a desi cut.