From time to time in these pages we track the progress of science-fiction films made beyond the Hollywood system. You may recall the arrival of Fedor Bondarchuk’s Attraction (2017) where an alien ship crashes into Moscow and one life form survives. He finds himself amidst a group of teens, as one does, especially the luminous Julia Lebedeva (Irina Starshenbaum), daughter of high-powered Russian army officer Colonel Lebedev. Love happens, everything that can go awry does, and lots of spectacular special effects later, Julia, who is in danger of dying, is saved by the alien’s healing touch, only for the alien himself to go the way of all flesh, or whatever flesh is called by that particular branch of the galaxy.
Come 2020, the sequel, Invasion , is slowly releasing across global territories, that is, wherever movie theatres are able to open. Julia is now the subject of experiments, since she is the only human to have had physical contact with the alien. She has a 24/7 security detail and her father is more powerful than ever. It turns out the alien is very much alive and is happily practising hydroponic vegetable husbandry in the sticks. Julia reunites with him only for her to be in a near death scenario again. He saves her again and now she is more alien than human, in an aesthetically-pleasing manner. The villain this time is not more aliens, but something mankind is all too familiar with – Artificial Intelligence, that controls the good people of Moscow via fake news transmitted on their smart devices. For anyone who uses a smart phone, the scenario created in Invasion is frighteningly believable, as are the amazing water effects that surpass anything I’ve seen in Hollywood products recently. A threequel is on the cards.
Bondarchuk features again, this time as an actor, in Egor Abramenko’s Sputnik that was at the Tribeca and Bucheon film festivals earlier this year. Set in 1983, at the height of the cold war, the film follows cosmonaut Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov) who has somehow made it back in one piece from a terrifying space mission and is now interred at a grim facility deep in the erstwhile Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic presided over by the enigmatic Colonel Semiradov (Bondarchuk). Veshnyakov has a secret and the only person who can get it out of him is the young doctor Tatyana (Oksana Akinshina), known for her unconventional methods.
Sputnik is a triumph of production design with its meticulous recreation of Russian Cold War architecture and machinery. Paying homage to the Alien film series, Sputnik is derivative of several more in the genre, with a brief nod to Event Horizon as well, but that’s a virtue. It is an effectively creepy horror sci-fi with some slimy, grisly moments that are not for the faint-hearted. The film is an expansion of Abramenko’s short The Passenger (2017) and marks an assured feature debut. In an ideal world, if Abramenko’s conceptual skills can expand into Bondarchuk’s bombastic vision, that would truly be a Russian sci-fi for the ages.
