Operation Safed Sagar review: Why new Netflix series on Kargil mission fails to touch the heart
Inspired by the Indian Air Force’s operation in Kargil during the 1999 war with Pakistan, the series has been directed by Oni Sen and boasts of a star cast that includes Jimmy Sheirgill, Siddharth, Dia Mirza and Prajakta Koli, among others.
Much of the first couple of episodes follow the central cast of characters on training exercises in the months leading up to the 1999 Kargil War.
Like so many visual effects-heavy productions from India, Netflix’s Operation Safed Sagar — inspired by the Indian Air Force’s operation in Kargil during the 1999 India-Pakistan war — sacrifices human drama in favour of flashy computer-generated sequences. These action scenes are obviously challenging for under-pressure VFX artists working on tight deadlines, but they’re also extremely difficult to perform for actors whose faces are concealed behind masks.
As visual effects have advanced in recent years, there has been an increase in the production of aerial warfare movies in India. But instead of using these newly available tools to enhance the storytelling, these movies appear to have relied on embellishments to conceal the shortcomings in scripts.
On a positive note, however, Operation Safed Sagar is better on virtually every front than films like Bhuj: The Pride of India (2021), set during the 1971 Indo-Pak war, which somehow turned one of the Indian Air Force’s most famous ground operations into a wall-to-wall explosion of aerial combat. It’s also superior to the Hrithik Roshan-led Fighter (2024), whose director blamed its box-office failure on audiences who aren’t accustomed to commercial air travel and Kangana Ranaut’s visibly unfinished Tejas (2023), which opened with her character taking arrows from the isolationist Sentinelese tribe. The less said about Aanand L. Rai’s Tere Ishq Mein (2025) the better. This was the flagrantly sexist movie in which Dhanush’s character uses his jet plane as a missile to prove his love to a woman he had been harassing.
The visual effects in Operation Safed Sagar, which was presumably produced on a lower budget than these films, are at par with what we saw in Bhuj and Fighter, and significantly better than anything in Tejas and Tere Ishq Mein.
From one cliche to the next
Much of the first couple of episodes follow the central cast of characters on training exercises in the months leading up to the 1999 Kargil War. The rules of these exercises are vaguely defined and the contest-like narrative structure gives the impression that director Oni Sen and his team of writers simply wanted to mimic Top Gun: Maverick (2022 US action drama).
The ensemble cast is led by Siddharth, who plays real-life war hero Ajay Ahuja. The Squadron Leader is brought in by Jimmy Sheirgill-portrayed Wing Commander BS Dhanoa to train a group of young pilots, played by Abhay Verma, Mihir Ahuja, Taaruk Raina and a few others. You could almost imagine Sky Force (2025 war drama based on 1965 Indo-Pak war) actor Veer Pahariya hopscotching his way onto set undetected.
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The performances by the young cast members are uniformly dull in the first couple of episodes, not because they’re untalented — each of them has proven what they’re capable of already — but because they’re given nothing to work with. Here’s a reliable rule of thumb: when one actor is bad, it’s their fault; but when more than one delivers a subpar performance, blame the director.
Scenes meant to convey camaraderie are poorly written to the point of being amateurish; later, when the characters are thrust into a war zone, the story asks them to perform like super soldiers and not human beings. The senior actors, particularly Siddharth and Sheirgill, come off largely unscathed. But their younger counterparts simply don’t have the experience to navigate an oppressively mediocre script that yanks them from one clichéd scenario to another.
Characterisation flaw
Operation Safed Sagar leaves little for the women characters to do. Why cast Dia Mirza if she isn’t even going to appear until the second episode? Why enlist Prajakta Koli if all she’s going to do is wait in the wings?
Although the series initially draws a clear line between the actions of governments and the duty of the armed forces, this line blurs with each passing episode. Operation Safed Sagar intersperses the drama with real-life news footage, portraying the ruling government at the time as both diplomatically and militarily unbeatable.
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The show features plenty of historical figures, much like Anubhav Sinha’s brilliant 2024 show IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack. But while that series, also on Netflix, strived to examine the human frailties of powerful personalities with nuance and empathy, Operation Safed Sagar presents them as one-note prototypes.
And while there could be no other antagonist than the Pakistanis in a show about the Kargil War, is it too much to ask that the villains in our films and shows be written with more depth?
