It was a blockbuster when it opened on the Subcontinent. But as in North America, being a big box office hit isn’t necessarily a qualifier for Oscar glory.

India’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature competition is a sentimental, feel-good and quite old-fashioned disaster movie.

“2018: Everyone is a Hero” is about the cyclonic monsoon floods that covered Kerala state in August of that year, an epic disaster compared by locals to the biggest flood of the previous century. It adheres to the time-established formula of disaster movies — following assorted characters, inside and outside of officialdom, as they face the calamity unfolding around them.

Some will step up. Some will underestimate the risk. Some will live and some will die.

The new wrinkles in the plot are the role climate change is playing in rising sea levels, making such coastal events far worse, something more than one character mentions. And there’s a novel way a Keral Emergency Operations Center calls for volunteers — via WhatsApp. A legion of young people on mopeds show up for duty in one of Jude Anthany Joseph’s films best scenes.

“2018” takes as its motto an opening aphorism — “Every calamity is just ‘news’ until it hits us.”

We meet Anoop (Tovino Thomas), a young man who’s come home after deciding the army’s “not for me,” all that getting up early in the morning nonsense and all. He tries to fit in back home, takes a fancy to the cute new school teacher (Tanvi Ram), and hopes to shed his self-confessed reputation as a “coward.”

Shaji (Kunchacko Boban) is a mid-level adminstrator with the state’s emergency preparedness center, fretting over his wife and child as he tries to nudge his dismissive superior into taking preventative measures.

“Is it better to save people after trapping them, or to save them before they are trapped,” he wants to know (in Malayam with English subtitles)?

Government higher-ups fret over panic, but TV, crowd-sourced websites and others are already raising the alarm about doomed dams, the higher sea levels and the downpour that’s just beginning.

The handsome chap his dad named “Nixon” (he has a brother named “Winston”) has dreams of being a famous model. But handsome or not, Nixon (Asif Ali) from a working class fishing family, which suggests to his intended bride’s father that they’ll all end up in a relief camp every time the water rises. At least the hunk has the good sense to go by the nickname “Popeye.” That creates expectations about what he’ll do when the chips are down.

And Aju Varghese plays a tour guide stuck leading a dopey Polish vlogger and his girlfriend around Kerala, showing off canceled boat races and the like in the middle of a torrential downpour.

A pre-disaster near tragedy at sea amongst the fishermen prefigures what is to come. And when the worst arrives, the effects take us into a massive flood, with rising water threatening all, daring underwater swims to save this person or that one and fishermen rising to the occasion amidst a chorus of weeping panic.

Westerners will note the film’s patriarchal touches. Only men are shown taking action and being heroic. And they do most of the weeping, too. No female character has agency in this account of the disaster.

But the real burden “2018” carries is trying to be different and better than scores of disaster movies that preceded it. It never sets itself apart from the genre pack in that regard, embracing many a tired trope and stereotype that these films are known for.

I haven’t seen the full field of films submitted “for your consideration” as Best International Feature this year. But this isn’t in the top five of my limited (20 or so titles) sample group.

Yes, it’s touching at times and modestly exciting at others. But whatever the scale of the tragedy and the heroism of those who faced it, “Everyone is a Hero” never quite clears “also ran” status.

Rating: unrated, violence, scenes of peril

Cast:Tovino Thomas, Kunchacko Boban, Aparna Balamurli, Tanvi Ram, Asif Ali, Lal, Narain and Aju Varghese

Credits: Directed by Jude Anthany Joseph, scripted by Akhil P. Dharmajan and Jude Anthany Joseph.  A Kavya Films release.

Running time: 2:06