Out of all the success stories this Oscar Season, Lion might be the most surprising. After not being talked about very much leading up to the nominations announcement, the film garnered an impressive six nominations, including Best Picture.

After receiving such acclaim, Lion has finally expanded to nationwide audiences. The film is based on the remarkable true story of Saroo, an Indian boy who gets lost one night and later is adopted by an Australian family. After two decades, he desires to search for the family he has been away from.

Lion will have a lot of passionate fans, but I am simply not one of them. Failing to capture the raw emotion of its remarkable true story, this wound up being a big disappointment for me.

Credit is due to this film for not taking a cliched approach to storytelling. Director Garth Davis is able to avoid a lot of the manipulation that awards bait movies like this could have. Broken up in three different periods, I admire how much time this film spent with Saroo as a child, with these segments being the film’s most gripping moments.

Performance-wise, everyone does a relatively good job. Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman may have received the Oscar recognition, but young Sunny Pawar is the stand out as young Saroo. It’s a strong performance that is among some of the best child actor work in recent memory. Patel and Kidman are also quite good, working off each other well and making the most of what they have to work with.

Lion is based on such a remarkable true story, but it’s a shame the film can never reach the emotional heights it could have. Its plagued by a litany of problems and I question why it was chosen to by the Academy to be a Best Picture nominee.

The concept here is great, but scribe Luke Davies does a poor job of bringing it to life on-screen. This film tries to cover so much ground in under two hours that it becomes an impossible feat. After a decent start, the film gets very disorienting in introducing new characters and dramatic ideas that it just becomes too much to handle. I can see how it worked as a novel, where there is a lot more room to develop concepts, but as a film it feels far too compact.

Not only is this script a mess, but it meanders a great deal. Much of the film’s final hour seemingly just meanders from scene to scene without much purpose. This again comes back to the film having too much going on, with the movie cutting between newly-introduced elements rather than what’s most important. It’s a shame that the big climax of the film feels like an afterthought, as it makes up only ten minutes or so of the actual running time.

Davies script never can get to the heart of its characters. All of the characters here are devoid of personality and depth, robbing the material of the potential impact it could have had. It’s a shame because the movie has all the materials for a great film.

Lion is by no means an awful movie, but it is an awful waste of a solid cast and a remarkable true story.

Grade: C-