Captain India is finally rolling. Kartik Aaryan's much-delayed film about an Indian Air Force pilot has gone on floors in London, five years after it was first announced back in 2021.

The project has had a rough road to get here. It's changed shape more than once since that initial announcement, and the version now shooting comes with a new man in the director's chair: Shimit Amin, who hasn't made a feature since Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year in 2009. Before that, there was Chak De! India, the Shah Rukh Khan hockey drama that's still held up as one of the tightest sports films Hindi cinema has made. A comeback of nearly two decades is no small thing, and it's clearly on Amin's mind too.

Kartik posted a note from Amin on social media, thanking the cast and crew for sticking with the film through what he called a difficult stretch. "As we embark on this journey to finally make our film, I want to thank each and everyone of you, from the bottom of my heart," Amin wrote. He went further, saying he could feel the weight the team was carrying to get this right. "I can feel that each and every one on this team carried the burden of wanting to make a really good film. I find that so magical. I feel your energy and it carries me through our toughest times."

The pilot, the mission, the look

Kartik's own caption was shorter and cheekier: "Ready to fly with the Maverick," tagging Amin and the film. Along with it came the first proper look at his character, in an Indian Air Force pilot's uniform, which is the clearest signal yet of what kind of film this is meant to be.

Captain India draws on a real-life Indian evacuation operation carried out in a country torn apart by war, with Kartik playing the pilot at the centre of that mission. It's being built as an action drama, not a war film in the conventional sense, and the screenplay comes from Nash Vazifdar, Sanchit Gupta and Priyadarshee Shrivastava.

What took so long is a fair question, and neither Kartik nor Amin has addressed it directly beyond that note about staying committed "despite the challenges." Films inspired by real military operations tend to need clearances, research trips, script rewrites, sometimes all three, and five years between announcement and camera rolling isn't unheard of for that kind of subject.

For Kartik, this is a swing at a genre he hasn't really attempted before, somewhere between the earnest patriotism of an evacuation drama and the physical demands of playing a fighter pilot on screen. For Amin, it's the film that decides whether Chak De! India was a peak or a pattern.

No release date has been mentioned yet. With the London shoot only just underway, that's the next thing to watch for.