Determined: Addri goes back into the danger zone to rescue a key figure who knows the solution to amassive flood in Jakarta.

An Indonesian movie might have a good story to tell, but it can be ruined by the big egos of over-ambitious production houses.

Bangkit! (Rise!) from director Raka Prijanto offers a number of interesting stories and angles that urban Jakartans can relate to in their daily lives.

Each of the main characters in the movie represents certain kinds of anxieties and issues within the social lives of the people who make Jakarta their home.

First, there is Addri (Vino G. Bastian), a search and rescue (SAR) unit officer who is estranged from his wife Indri (Putri Ayudya) and kids — daughter Eka (Yasamin Jasem) and son Dwi (Adriyan Bima) — because he is too busy saving people’s lives.

Addri’s job takes so much of his time that he is forced to miss Eka’s piano recital because his unit needs him to save people from a flooded basement. This leads Eka to believe that his father cares more about other people than his own family.

Then there are a couple of lovers — Arifin (Deva Mahendra), who is a meteorologist, and Denanda (Acha Septriasa), who is a medical doctor. Due to the massive flood that has been hitting Jakarta, their wedding ceremony is canceled after the groom is trapped in the flooded basement.

What is interesting about the characters of Arifin and Denanda is the fact that they are depicted as Christians. This shows Raka’s great sense in bringing up the reality of Jakarta’s pluralist society onto the big screen.

In a rush: Addri (center) leads his team into another rescue mission.

These people and situations sound very familiar. Those who work and live in Jakarta often find themselves pinned between their jobs and families. They need to do their jobs to put food on the table, but on the other hand, doing so means that they spend just a little time with their loved ones as they also have to battle everlasting traffic jams, floods and long working hours.

We can also see ourselves in Arifin and Denanda who are forced to lose a precious moment in life during Jakarta’s seasonal floods. We sometimes find ourselves helpless against the red tape bureaucracy.

Raka uses a massive flood disaster as a canvas to deliver these simple yet relatable stories and add more layers of social context as the film progresses.

There is some sort of class warfare in the way Raka depicts how “the haves” and “the privileged”, such as high-ranking government officials and their cronies, remain safe within their ivory towers when Jakarta is drowned.

While the stories seem promising and have a lot of potential, it is the execution that makes Bangkit! a disappointment.

The film marketing team boasts Bangkit! as the first Indonesian CGI-generated disaster film and in doing so, it already begins its downfall. It tries too hard to mimic or recreate Brad Peyton’s San Andreas (2015) that most of the time it becomes downright superficial, which is ironic considering the fact that most of its stories come from the spirit of being relatable to the regular life of Jakartans.

Technology is not the only thing that Bangkit! tries to mimic from Hollywood. In terms of the scripting, the film also regularly takes clichéd lines from Hollywood disaster films such as “women and children first!” The way the characters express themselves shoves us further away from knowing them because they speak as if uttering American dialogue translated into Indonesian.

All of these obsessions raise the question: why try so hard to become so superficial like Hollywood movies when you already have great, simple and realistic stories to tell?
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BANGKIT!
(Suryanation, 90 minutes)

Director: Raka Prijanto
Cast: Vino G. Bastian, PutriAyudya, Deva Mahendra,Acha Septriasa