I am normally the type to faithfully trudge to any new local movie, but I put off watching Aziz M Osman's biopic [#1]Leftenan Adnan [/#] for weeks and weeks. There were two reasons for this.

The first has to do with the over-zealous marketing efforts of the people behind the film. The backers aren't your everyday tycoons who expect the company of starlets, but the Royal Malaysian Army. Our men in uniform had the clout to compel certain government and private institutions to buy bulk tickets for charity screenings. This is how Leftenan Adnan made RM1 million even before general screening began. This method of promotion seemed so big-bully that my natural instinct was to resist.

The second is the word-of-mouth that filtered through about the "patriotic messages" that clutter the film. I didn't want to pay to choke on heavy-handed slogans when I could get them for free on TV. The Star columnist Seri Bintang, in a dingbat way, even praised the film because it echoes the things said by our Prime Minister. With a good review like this, who needs any bad ones?

But I could only make excuses for so long, and I finally went ahead to the cinema yesterday. I'm glad I did.

First off, its use of Cinemascope and basic Dolby ensure that Leftenan Adnan looks and sounds better than your average Malay flick. As a period movie, it's also designed and lit with a certain degree of care. My main technical complains would be the quality of voice dubbing and also the inconsistent colour tones, probably a result of mixing different film stocks. But I digress. Technique is not the main issue; what about the story?

Leftenan Adnan became a World War II hero when he and his men in the Malay Regiment held off the marauding Japanese in Bukit Candu, Singapore in February 1942. He was captured and killed only a day before the British formally surrendered to the Japanese. His name survives as a testament to the Malay soldier's courage and resilience, and his story has been documented enough to avoid the semi-mythical aura of, say, Tok Janggut or Mat Kilau.

Of course, the central irony of Adnan's canonisation as a proto-nationalist hero was that he was himself employed by the British. It's an irony that has some dramatic value, but the movie version can only hint at it. The film is more interested in contrasting Adnan's valour and loyalty against people like the Kesatuan Melayu Muda's Ibrahim Yaacob, pictured here as an idealist who nevertheless sold his people out to the Japanese.

The Malay intelligentsia at the time did initially support the encroaching Japanese, whom they saw as liberators. But I don't know if they went to the extent of being present at the Kelantan beach to welcome the Japs and flag off their cycling tour of Malaya. I must have been absent for that day's Sejarah lesson.

The demonisation of Ibrahim, with its "danger of collaborating with imperialists" subtext, forms one of the "patriotic messages" that I had been warned against. The fact that the actor's speech tones uncannily matched those of a certain jailed present-day politician may not be a coincidence.

The idea, of course, is that it's better to just obey rather than think too much, which might get you in all sorts of trouble, bayonet-waving Japs being just one manifestation.

No historical movie can or should simply mirror the past; a historical project is always an act of reclaiming and re-seeing. It also needs to have some sort of relevance to contemporary audiences. This is what those Hollywood dingbats who made Anna and the King didn't understand; people stayed away in droves from that one, except in good old Malaysia.

To be relevant without being banal: it's not a small challenge. But the anachronistic sloganeering in Leftenan Adnan , which included ingredients for nation-building, managed to spoil quite a few scenes. When the British colonel died, his dying statement didn't have to be "I don't regret coming to Malaya", or how impressed he was with the fighting skills of Malay soldiers. We sort of got the picture.

What to do? We have come to expect such reassuring "messages", especially when we know that the film is backed by such powerful forces. Leftenan Adnan is well-shaped and never boring; it's one of the best films by one of our best directors; it's bound to win all sorts of awards at the next Malaysian Film Festival. But it would be even better if it told us something we hadn't already been told a million times before.