Russian science fiction – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

SPACE CORN: STAR MIND reviewed.

Russia’s much awaited Space Adventure film arrives at last. But haven’t we seen it all somewhere before?

STAR MIND (Syesdni Razoom) had been in the offing for half a decade before it made it into the Russian cinemas on January 6^th this year, doing so amidst precious little in the way of public poster campaigns or journalistic coverage (which may account for my seeing it in an almost empty cinema hall).

STAR MIND constitutes a 98-minute-long `adventure fantasy` certified at 12^+.Whilst its trailers seem to promise a horror, it would be more accurate to view it as pure (`hard`) science fiction laced with some thriller and action elements.

R.D Studios, who focus on the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres and who brought us Abigail (2019) are behind it.

The 38-year-old man with the megaphone Vyacheslav Lisnevsky, who worked on the fantasy drama Eclipse from 2017 here directs a young cast of relative unknowns.

The main protagonist, Doctor Steve Ross, is played by Egor Koreshkov. Russian television viewers will know him for his role in the series Eighties this year and he stars in the much-anticipated future world drama We due out this year. Alena Konstantinova supplies the love interest. Other players include Dmitry Frid, Alexander Kuznetsov (who sadly died before this film was released) and – it is interesting to see – a `woman of colour` in the form of Liza Martinez.

The picture, shot in the more futuristic areas of Moscow and in Charyn Canyon in Kazakhstan, represents something of a test case. We already know that Russia has the capability to roll out some credible science-fiction blockbusters because of the precedents of Inhabited Island (1 and 2) and Invasion (2020). STAR MIND however, consists of an off-world space adventure requiring even more lavish visual effects. Can Russian cinema meet this challenge?

Interrupted Quest.

The film opens a decade or so hence with the Earth in the grip of an ecological virus which takes a malign toll on the biosphere leading to plants and animals perishing and our planet becoming ever more uninhabitable.

In the midst of this, however, strange artefacts get discovered in caves around the world. These take the form of orbs and hail from we know not where. Doctor Ross is the man who learns how to activate them. It appears that they function as `seeders` and are able to make planets with oxygen and water even more able to cradle new life.

It is he who sets up Project Gemini. The mission of this is to seek out Earth’s twin planets and then terraform them using these orbs, thus finding a new habitat for humanity.

Egor Koreshkov as Doctor Steven Ross [Kinofilmpro.ru]

A team of men – and one Afro-Caribbean woman -and he take a shuttle through an intergalactic wormhole set for just such a planet.

Meanwhile, via flashbacks, we learn that the good doctor has a complicated relationship with a woman back on Earth who is pregnant by him (a romantic subplot which will go on to gain significance).

The ship carries them off course and they arrive at a planet they had not planned to – which nevertheless seems to have the right credentials for terraforming. All the while, a slimy critter has been a stowaway with them, hiding in the orb that they had taken on-board with them (Because – because…whatever). This tentacled monster is now at loose in the ship, picking off the crew, and with its own plans for the new planetary home….

We can see that this storyline is not the product of a lengthy brainstorming lunch. In fact, it is a stitching together of Interstellar (2014) and the Alien franchise (from 1979). The scriptwriters have made some attempts to put their own stamp on things. The life-spreading orbs are a fresh creation and there is a twist concerning the monster: it is a robot.

Dejavu.

The iconography of STAR MIND seems all rather familiar. We have ship with chunky steel doorways and crepuscular interiors with plenty of brightly lit consoles, and a cast of uniformed young men -and one black woman (who is given to running about in her underwear – Ripley style). The new planet too is all craggy and rocky in its terrain.

The technology on show seems like an odd clash of the current and the fantastical. The crew’s spaceship is a shuttle much like the ones employed by NASA in the present day and it is blasted off in a rocket also like the ones we know and are used to. Later, however the ship enters an` interdimensional wormhole` type thing of a much more extravagant nature.

The most jarring aspect of the film is the fact that all the characters are known by Western names. All the signs and computer readouts are in English too. Even the inclusion of a black woman can be taken as an attempt to underscore the impression that this is an American crew rather than any move towards diversity.

K.D Studios seem to be leaving nothing to chance: they are casting their net for the widest demographic which means the Anglosphere and having a 12+ certificate.

The problem here is that all the production team’s grey matter seems to have been expended on the – quite striking – visual impact of the film but at the expense of the plot and characterization. It is like an ornate chocolate box housing mediocre chocolate.

Popcorny.

That being said STAR MIND does retain some charms. Taken as a creature-feature it faces stiff competition from its compatriots in the form of Kola Superdeep (2020) and Sputnik (2020) and cannot even begin to compete. It does, nevertheless, feature some tense sequences: the frozen body of one of the crew slams into the window of their craft, the monster punches its way through the reinforced steel doorways and so on.

Also, while the ideas in the film may be second-hand, these ideas are interesting and do inform the events in the film.

STAR MIND may not be the epic that it promised to be. It is more of a popcorn-friendly B-movie, but is none the worse for that. There is even something endearing in its desperation to please its demographic. I am reminded more of the film Life (2017) more than anything else.

The Russian online feedback to its debut seems divided. Some claim to be duly impressed by the professionalism of its production values. They are in the minority however. There are much more couch critics who sneer at the film’s copycat nature.

Perhaps we should not worry too much. STAR MIND has demonstrated that the Russian film industry can muster up a respectable space adventure to match anything of the kind from Hollywood. Next time they just need to make sure that everyone knows that it is Russian!

The Western title will be PROJECT GEMINI [Kinopoisk.Ru]

Lead image:Datavyhoda.ru

WHAT A BLAST! A review of Tatyana Tolstaya’s `THE SLYNX`.

Tolsstaya’s sole novel is a science-fantasy farce about the destruction of Russia – and it has divided opinion since publication.

-Who is Pushkin? From around here?
-A genius. He died long ago.
-He ate something bad? (p-123)
Russia has had much to say in the way of anti-utopias, having more or less written the rulebook on them. The post-apocalyptic story – this sister subgenre, however – far less so. Where has there been a Russian or Soviet novel that can stand alongside Walter Miller Junior’s A Canticle for Leibowitz from the America of 1959?

This impasse came to be challenged in 1987 as the Soviet edifice began to wobble, when Ludmilla Petrushevskaya penned The New Robinson Crusoe: A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century.
Published in Novy Mir, this short story explores the life of a family in an unspecified post-disaster scenario. Then it would be 15 years later when Dmitry Glukhovsky launched the Metro cycle – his account of the survivors of a nuclear war who have decamped to the Moscow subway – which has become a global pop culture phenomenon.

Sandwiched between these two portents however, came Russia’s true post-apocalyptic classic. Tatiana Nikitichna Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy’s grandaughter, had become known for her short stories commenting on the perestrioka period. The Slynx (Kys) constituted something of a departure for her. Begun in 1986 and toiled over for 14 years whilst in Russia, Europe, Britain and America, this novel came to claim the Triumph prize in 2001 (a prize which had been set up a decade earlier to recognise outstanding contributions to Russian culture). It became the book to be seen with in the Russia of 2002.

THE SLYNX (KYS)is both a literary novel and a bestseller in Russia.[Pinterest].

Not all critics were convinced however. Dmitry Bykov was one of the naysayers, comparing the novel to a poor man's The Snail on the Slope ( referencing a novel by the Sturgatsky brothers).

It would be three years later when the late Jamey Gambrell would transmute into English the awkward colloquial Russianess of Tostaya’s prose as a New York Review book.

Clownland.
Tolstaya’s fantasia opens some two centuries hence, after an event spoken of as as the Blast (some sort of nuclear accident). This has laid waste to Moscow and nature, of sorts, has reclaimed the space. A new community of survivors has built a new town there -called Fyodor Kuzmichsk.
The townspeople are mutated in different ways (referred to as Consequences) and this fact creates the gross out texture of the proceedings.

Otherwise they are in a new Dark Ages: not religious, yet full of superstitious dread. Free-thinking, which is to say any kind of intellectual curiosity, is dicouraged with self-censorship.

Having only just invented the wheel, they assume the earth to be flat, have no mirrors and cannot make or sustain fire. They subsist in a feudal society regulated by the fearsome Saniturions who sledge their way round the town, wearing red hoods, on the look out for dissidence. The mainstay of the economy is mice – from which they make their food and clothing. Printed books from pre-Blast times – Oldenprint – are spurned as they are thought to give off radiation. The leader, however, transcribes poetry from the past and passes it off as his own work.

It is a topsy-turvy landscape in which rabbits dwell in trees and chickens can fly. The main beasts of burden are theDegenerators – unfortunate human-like (and articulate) four legged chimeras. The eponymous Slynx, meanwhile, (the Russian word – kys– suggests a jumble of different animals) is an invisible entity lying in wait in the surrounding forests and much feared bt Benedikt, the narrator.

One audacious twist appears in this not so unfamiliar freakshow. It is that there are some people – Oldeners – who have not only survived the Blast but have done so with a much prolonged lifespan. As refugees from the pre-apocalypse world, many try to restore a sense of cultural continuity by, for example, putting up signposts around with the name of old Moscow streets on them. For the reader, they provide a much needed foothold in things.

Benedikt, our cheery simpleton host, talks us through the do’s and don’ts of his milieu and through the unpredictable plot. He will marry above his station, gain a love of reading after being introduced to a stash of Oldenprint books and be lured into becoming an insurgent….

The dreamlike close of the novel is as puzzling as it is disappointing. Another enigma is the very title of the novel. What are we to read into the fact that this bogeyman has been highlighted in this way?

New take on an old genre.
Science fiction aficiocandoes will be reminded of Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980) and Engine Summer by John Crowley (1979).
There is more of a light touch to Tolstaya’s approach though. Indeed, some high comedy arises from the hero’s rustic ignorance. Here the Oldener, Nikita, hints at how to produce fire:
Nikita Ivanich said: -Think friction, young man. friction. Try it. I'd be happy to but I'm too old. I can't` Benedikt said:–Oh, come on now, Nikita Ivanich. You talk about how old you are, but there you go being bawdy again. (p-128).

We also have the Comedy of Revulsion – as Benedikt details people’s Consequences and unappetising eating habits in a gleeful manner.
However, it is Tolstaya’s embrace of folkloric elements which distinguishes it from other post-apocalyptic novels. Those expecting Naturalism are instead obliged to take the story on a more metaphorical level.

Gambrell deserves credit for conveying the linguistic oddness of the novel with its corrupted syntax (feelosophy deportmunt store and so on).The chapter headings are old Russian alphabet letters and words that begin with these. (Like Clockwork Orange, The Slynx could function as a primer on the Russian language – as well as Russian poetry, much of which is dispersed throughpout the novel).

Informed by Chernobyl, The Slynx does contain a cautionary aspect to it as well as a Ray Bradbury-like concern with cultural amnesia (which may well be a reflection on it having been written in early post-Soviet times). Printed books seem to safeguard against this. As Benedikt proclaims:
You, book! You are the only one who won't deceive, won't insult, won't abandon....(p-204).

Some other sequences draw parallels with our own times, and by no means only in Russia. Following their coup d’etat Benedikt and his father-in-law discuss freedom of ass ocean. After deciding that no more than three can gather Benedikt raises a point:
And what if there are six people in a family? Or seven?
Father-in law spat:...let them fill in a form and get permission (p-278).

Glukhovsky and Tolstaya are not often mentioned in the same breath but I did feel a real sense of kinship between the Metro series and The Slynx. Tolstaya’s novel could almost co-exist in the same universe as Glukhovsky’s, by offering the story of those who survived in overland Moscow.

Tolsyaya: the one time Bright Young Thing of Gorbachev’s Russia.

All quotations are from: Tolstaya Tatyana The Slynx (New York: New York Review Books, 2003). Translated by Jamey Gambrell.

The lead image:infourok.ru

LOVE PANGS IN A GLASS FORTRESS: `WE` BY YEVGENY ZAMYATIN RECONSIDERED.

Ahead of the forthcoming film, I take a fresh look at this seminal science fiction anti-utopia – and the new relevance it has since gained.

I am a man and not a number.

Yet, my life is overuled by passcodes, passport numbers and national insurance numbers. I have sold my privacy to vast tech empires who decide what I want through algorithms. With me I carry a device which allows all my movements to be monitored…And whilst .I am not obliged to wear a uniform, I choose to dress in more or less the same way as everyone else….

This year marks the century after Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin’s novel WE was completed. No coincidence is it that the cultural event of this year is to be the big screen adaptation of this challenging fantasia. The timing, in terms of world events could not have been more auspicious.

WE was written when Zamyatin, a ship architect by trade living in St Petersburg, was 37. It received its first main publication in English in New York however in 1924 – the same year that Kafka’s The Trial also came out.

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884 – 1937) [Goodreads.com]

My own introduction to the book came back in the Eighties when I was discussing Nineteen Eighty Four with a doped up undergraduate. He informed me that Orwell had, like, stolen all his ideas from some Russian geezer.

This half-truth forms most people’s first brush with WE. If they then go on to read the novel itself they do so only to make comparisons with Orwell’s classic – or perhaps with Huxley’s Brave New World.

Orwells’s debt to Zamyatin is a matter of record: Orwell reviewed the novel in Tribune (4th January, 1946). Huxley has never acknowledged the same influence, but Orwell (in that piece) felt it existed.

In any case, whilst it is by no means true to call WE `the first dystopian novel` it is, for sure, one that laid down the blueprint for many which came to follow. (My version, the Vintage imprint, is introduced by Will Self. This well-read bibliophile admits to not having read the novel before he did so to review it, and he read it on the Hebridean island where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty Four).

Zamyatin penned much else in different genres. If he is only known for WE then this is because is is this work that prompted the just installed Bolshevik apparatchiks to enusure that it never saw print in the Soviet Union. Zamyatin’s response – to get it printed on foreign soil -set the trend for many dissident scribes that followed him.

Better late than never: A Russian imprint of WE [goodreads.com]

It is time to excavate this novel from all of its associations with better known writings and also from its political backstory and try and encounter it afresh.

Everything is awesome.

We are in the far future. The One State, presided over by the ever watchful Great Benefactor, is the only collection of humans to have survived the Two Hundred Year’s War which has shattered urban society. They now live protected from individual freedom in a city composed of glass buildings. Around this is a `Green Wall` which quarantines them from the savagery of the natural world. Their daily activities are circumscribed by a Taylorist style `Table of Hours`. They have been assigned numbers instead of names and all wear a uniform.

`WE` established the archetype of the quintessential industrial-technocratic anti-utopia.[pinterest.com]

A spaceship engineer called D-503 keeps a journal and it is these first person present tense reflections that make up this novel. He is helping to build the Integral – a spaccraft that has the purpose of exporting the values of this society to other worlds. The narrator is foursquare behind this:

`Indeed is there a place where happiness is wiser, more cloudless than this miracle world?…nothing is happier than digits living according to the well-constructed, eternal laws of the multiplication table` (p-59).

However he comes to obsess over an unusual young woman (serial dating is encouraged by a voucher system which would put Tinder to shame). It turns out that she is an opponent of the regime. His attraction to her has distinct sadomasochistic overtones:

`And suddenly she burst out laughing. I could see this laughter with my eyes: the ringing, sever, stubbornly supple (like a whip), crooked line of this laughter`. (p-27)

D503’s inner struggle between his conventional loyalty to the One State and primal lust for this woman – I-330- drives the narrative to its tragic foregone conclusion.

The premise, then has since become so embedded that you will have encountered it in popular film culture in such films as Metropolis (1927), Sleeper (1973), Rollerball (1975), Demolition Man (1993) and Equilibrium (2002), to name but a few.

Russian S.F from the Twenties.

WE comprises a novel that belongs to the Nineteen Twenties just as surely as, say, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It is drenched with all the concerns of that decade: new machineries, female emancipation, modernism and a sense of despair at the future of humanity.

Also WE is far more of a generic science-fiction story than Orwell’s much more down-to-earth and more topical extraction of it.

It also must not be forgotten that is a part of Russian literature. It contains echoes of Dostoevsky here and there, as well as references to Pushkin. The polished style partakes of the avant garde ferment which enriched Russia at that time. (In fact, it is this latter aspect of the novel – its difficult prose – which has done much to discourage people from giving WE more attention).

More than an anti-Soviet diatribe.

It seems simplistic to view this Twenty Sixth Century world as being a comment on the Soviet Union. Yes, some aspects of `Stalinism` were anticipated with accuracy by Zamyatin: the use of Secret Police as spies (`The Guardians`) and The Day of One Vote, for example. Much else is more about technocracy than State Socialism, however.

Like Bulgakov, Zamyatin was labouring under the long shadow cast by H.G.Wells, with his antiseptic messianism. The society of One State, a kind of Rationalist Utilitarian one, resembles Gene Roddenberry’s Vulcans as much as anything:

`Take two trays of a weighing scale: you put a grain on one, and on the other put a ton. On one side the `I` and on the other is the `we`, the One state…Assuming that `I` has the same `rights` compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming that a grain can counterbalance a tone` (p-102).

Then against the psychology of this totalitarianism Zamyatin juxtaposes a primitive sexual infatuation – in its way just as deranged.

New resonances.

I have read WE about four times during the last decade, and in different translations. Clarence Brown (1993) then Mira Ginsburg(1983) and now the London based American Natasha Randall ((2006) Her variant seems to work best for me, although I would be hard pressed to explain why.

Getting past the Expressionist style of narration we find a novel that delivers a science fictional kick. There is a death ray that turns people to liquid, a Bell Jar used as a torture device,diaphanous listening gadgets lining the streets, robot tutors and a space craft that gets given a test flight.

On top of all that the world of WE has never seemes less implausible. Post-Covid, Zoom and so on have become all pervasive – with the result that we all indeed live in glass compartments, in effect, and the police have been granted unpresedented powers to direct people’s private lives.

Anticipations.

So I really hope that Hamlet Dulyan’s cinema adaptation will be more on the edgy side than precious. That is to say that it should not treat the tale as some sort of signed and sealed `period piece`, still less some kind of retrospective on the Soviet years.

I hope that the director has not been too `highbrow` has remembered that WE functions above all as a science-fiction yarn. Furthermore he needs to have brought out the eroticism of it all,

We shall see.

All translations are from: Zamyatin, Yevgeny WE. Translated by Natasha Randall. (London: Vintage, 2007).

The lead image is from: atomsand archetypes.wordpress.com

THE DAY MOSCOW STOOD STILL: the film VTORZHENIYE (INVASION).

Can a Putinist popcorn merchant produce another film with something to say? The launch of INVASION – the long-awaited sequel to the science-fiction classic ATTRACTION – gave us a chance to find out.

I could smell the aftermath of fireworks as I hurried to the Yuzhny cinema in the unseasonal sleet and sludge. I was en route to a different type of pyrotechnic show. Like a dutiful Russian citizen, I was ready to see the very definition of a national blockbuster – VTORZHENIYE – INVASION.

This 12+ certificate extravaganza – a follow-up to ATTRACTION ( 2017) – had been promoted in every way possible. The TVs on in the metro carriages reminded us of it. Every cinema in town had an installation dedicated to it in the lobby. Hell, even the safety instructions at the beginning of this film were led by the actors from it!

For once, therefore, I could pick which cinema to go to. Also.this being the holiday season, I could choose when to go. I went to a showing in the Chertanovo region of Moscow, which is where ATTRACTION had been set and filmed. I chose three days after its December 31st opening as a way to mark the New Year.

Bondarchuk’s shadow.
The fifty-two-year old Muscovite Fyodor Bondarchuk heads Art Picture Studios as the director of INVASION. Something of an establishment lynchpin, this man is known for his grandstanding for the President of Russia and for the ruling United Russia party.

In terms of style, he seems something of a cinematic Christopher Marlowe who aims for the big, the brash and the loud. In accordance with this he has been responsible for such evocations of patriotic heroism as Stalingrad (2013).
Bondarchuk, however, does have form with the rather more cerebral science fiction genre. Before ATTRACTION he surprised critics with a faithful rendition of an Arkady & Boris Strugatsky novel in the form of The Dark Planet (2008).

So whilst Bondarchuk’s name is not one that would draw me to see a film, my interest was piqued by the fact that I had enjoyed ATTRACTION. In that film, the aliens were obvious representations of immigrants and the Other. `Let’s try to hear each other` was Bondarchuk’s summary of his message at the time (quoted in Flickering Myth, January 22nd, 2018). I was intrigued by this apparent cryptoliberalism and concerned to see whether it would continue in what is also known as ATTRACTION 2.

Dejavu.
The cast list from ATTRACTION are back in service. Irina Starshenbaum – who I last saw as a rock and roll widow in Summer – plays Yulia Lebedev once more and the 59-year-old Laurence Olivier Theatre Award winner Oleg Menshikov is still her father and her geek buddy, Google, remains as Evgeni Miksheev.

Alexander Petrov – proving yet again that he’s a big enough actor (and man) to depict rather pathetic characters – returns as Yulia’s would be lover.

The thirty year old Rinal Mukhamentov (The Three Musketeers, 2013) – a sort of Tatar Justin Timberlake – reprises his role as Hakon, the alien.
The other stars – the fun gizmos – also make a welcome return. The now iconic gyroscope like mothership has been replaced and is circling our planet again. The Transformer-like exoskeletal body combat suit also re-appears as does all that aquatic witchcraft which has water coiling in spirals in the air.

Filmed in IMAX by Vladislav Opelyants (Hostages, 2017) and with a score by the much in demand Igor Vdovin (Another Woman, 2019) INVASION attempts to satisfy every cinema going demographic. Half family drama and romance and half military adventure, the scenes lurch between smoochy bits, tense action and disaster movie grandeur and then back again.

Sorcery from the sky.
We find ourselves in the present day, but it is one in which the events of ATTRACTION have taken place. (The back story is suggested in the opening credits by the use of frozen lazer-like stills from key scenes of the earlier film).

Yulia now studies astrophysics in Moscow alongside her loyal mate Google. She is, however, no ordinary woman. Always flanked by bodyguards, she is under investigation by a new military unit concerned with all things E.T, led by her father. She spends her evenings in a flotation tank, being tested for psi-powers.

Russia, meanwhile, is busy aspiring to reverse engineer the technology that the aliens had left in their wake. Meanwhile they have surrounded our planet with defense satellites to prevent further incursions into our atmosphere.

The military unit re-introduces Yulia to Artyom, who is now incapacitated by a stroke. This is a deliberate ploy. The disturbance this creates in Yulia’s mind results in a telekinetic storm.

Later, as she knocks back a few medicinal cocktails in a downtown bar and tries to flirt with her minder, Hakon makes a sudden re-appearance….

The handsome star man is now earthbound and ensconced in a pleasant dacha outside Moscow. However, he continues to be in contact with a mothership’s on board computer. He has gained the information that an alien Artificial Intelligence called Ra has taken an interest in Yulia’s awakened psychic powers.
The couple elope with the military in hot pursuit. The rest of the action consists of a three-way tussle between Hakon and Yulia, the military and the mysterious Ra.

Ra has the ability to control the world’s electronic media and puts out the fake news that Yulia is a terrorist. Later, in a rather Biblical episode, it summons up the waters around and below Moscow to envelop the city in a sort of vertical whirlpool….

…Or something. If this plot sounds freakish and preposterous that is because it is nothing more than a Christmas tree upon which various spectacular action scenes – military helicopters spiralling out of control, geysers destroying Park Kulturi metro station and so on – are hung.

Yulia’s story.
There is much tension between the intimate and the global in all of this. At its core, INVASION concerns the emotional journey of Yulia and her fixing it with her father, making peace with Artyom and deepening her relationship with Hakon. Starshenbaum has enough magnetism to make this focus work.

Otherwise the film is lacking in a central idea of the kind that made ATTRACTION so interesting. Sure, the subplot about fake news in the electronic mass media is very topical, but it is not at the heart of the story.

Whilst a composite of many motion pictures that have gone before it, INVASION is quite distinctive in its overall effect. The recent Avanpost however, covered the same sort of territory with bleaker conviction.

Still, as I shook my head through this two hour and thirteen minute farrago, I thought: what a roaring way to welcome in the Roaring Twenties!

Main image: capelight.de

Trailer to INVASION (English subtitles).

BORDERLAND TROOPERS: the long awaited film AVANPOST.

Is there anything more to this 1812 Overture of a movie than pomp and glitz?

Fingers on triggers, a detachment of troops lie in wait at the edge of the forest. They sense something is about to happen. Then there is a rumbling sound growing ever louder. Then, from out of the trees, comes a mass of marauding bears. The soldiers open fire at the possessed animals, but still they come….

Every so often the Russian Federation knocks out an ambitious and lavish screen production like Daywatch (2006) or Dark Planet (2008) to impress the world with.

The science fiction action thriller AVANPOST – its Western title is The Blackout – is fresh from that same assembly line. Trumpeted by electronic billboards all over Moscow, this grandiose epic arrives after having been in gestation for several years and is being shipped out to cinemas in the Baltic and also Austria and Germany.

AVANPOST , a product of 123 Productions, TNT Premier and TV3 – represents another collaboration between television and cinema in the manner of the recent Gogol franchise (2017 – 2018). Indeed the cinematographer behind this also worked on those Gogol movies. As we shall see, however, AVANPOST is far removed from the whimsical nature of that franchise.

The thirty-eight year old Muscovite Ilya Kulikov, who scripted The Envelope (2017) wielded the pen here and the 31 year old Ekaterinburg born Yegor Baranov directed this . He has form on such ambitious projects: he was responsible for `Russia’s first erotic thriller` – Sanchara (Locust) (2103). He too was involved in the Gogol series.

There are some established names in the cast list as well. The 37-year-old Pyotr Federov (Ledokol, 2016) forms one of the main leads as does Alexei Chadov (Dark Planet).

Mood music plays a conspicuous role in this motion picture. Ryan Otter’s majestic and doomy style of composition, evident in Abigail (2019) fits the bill here. Also though, none other than Linkin Park‘s Mike Shinoda has recorded a song – `Fine` – just for the film.

`Who will save you when the world falls into darkness?`
[youtube.com]

Entrapment.

The action occurs about fifteen years hence and in the capital of Russia. Drone like vehicles light up the city sky, people consult transparent cell phones and holographic displays are all over the place. Otherwise life goes on much as before.

We are introduced to the men and women who are to be the protagonists, including a businessman and a taxi driver – before the cataclysm turns everyone’s life upside down.

Without warning, planes drop from the skies as the lights go out plunging much of the world into darkness and vast swathes of humanity perish without any known cause.

One of the areas left unaffected consists of a large part of Moscow. Here life seems to continue unabated (who needs imports?) although the Muslim community has become strident.

Everyday life has become brutalised too. In one gratuitous sequence, one of our heroes stabs a man in the hand with a small ice breaker from the bar of a nightclub for getting a bit persistent with a woman at a nightclub. Later, after this man has followed the couple outside, their taxi driver obliges by shooting him in the leg twice.

The crucial change, however, is that a military detachment has been set up to monitor the outskirts of the – as they call it – `circle of life`. Both men and women of a certain age are conscripted into this.

The rest of the story concerns the predicament and exploits of these soldiers. Much of the action henceforth consists of them togged up and carrying guns with lazer sights, en masse beneath a leaden sky or at night, battling with an invisible foe in the manner of Predator(1987) – which is name checked in the dialogue.

Adversaries.

It is when the villains – they are interstellar interlopers – show themselves that the credibility that the film had so far tried so hard to build up begins to crack.

The aliens- Lord Voldermort lookalikes – prove both unoriginal and a little silly. They communicate via mind transference and also have the ability to mess with our perceptions. They can make us imagine that our long-lost fathers are paying us a visit when what is really there is a nonplussed cop. This way they set hordes of zombified people up against the valiant men and women in uniform, who then have to gun down the former in cold blood. It is all a bit like a cross between Skyline (2016) and World War Z (2013).

Of course there are added subtleties to the plot. The aliens seem to contain factions within their population and the Outpost leaders make an alliance with one of them. (A situation reminiscent of the Gene Roddenberry inspired Canadian T V show Earth Final Conflict from the Nineties).

The entry of the alien’s mothership – a rickety almost steampunkish affair – into Moscow airspace reminds us that there could be the makings of good science fiction somewhere in this – but it comes as the show closes.

Slick.

AVANPOST offers a glossy experience with action and plot in thrall to appearances.Even for a two and a half hour show it felt as though the canvas was too small for the ideas in it (for there were some) to be developed in full. We may have to wait for the threatened sequel or a proposed TV series for that.

I was put in mind of several cinematic forerunners, some of which I have already mentioned. The worst comparison I made, though was with Starship Troopers (1997), because it had the same militarism but lacked the irony which made that picture worthwhile.

The film may be an example of Russian `soft power`. A commentator called Daryanoff, writing a user review in the IMDB, seems to think so: `as a Russian this is a point to pride`, he says. Yet the things that mark this out as a Russian product – the paranoid sense of being encircled, for example – are the very things which will do nothing to dispel any negative stereotypes of Russians that are out there.

AVANPOST failed to charm me. I was as repelled by its cynical violence just as I came to be suspicious of its humorless machismo. The film, however, did stay with me for far longer than many a better film has done.

Featured image from: Kinopoisk.ru.

AVANPOST:International trailer (English).

AQUABOY: A new English language imprint of the strangest iconic tale to come out of Stalin’s Russia.

What enlivened a grey February afternoon in a bookshop was chancing on a new English version of The Amphibian (1928) by Alexander Belyaev.

The film adaptation of this had already introduced me to the premise of a young man who can live underwater, as it seems to be a permanent fixture on Russian television and is regarded with affection by many East Europeans of a certain age.

Until now though, I had not enjoyed the opportunity to snuggle up with the novel that had inspired the film. Karo Publishers based in St Petersburg – best known for their translated versions of Golden and Silver age greats by Pushkin and Tolstoy et al – have changed all that by bringing out The Amphibian last year.

Blockbuster.

Lenfilm’s Chelovek Amphibia (1962) constitutes a glitzy and exotic boy-meets-girl fantasy romance. The film provides a testimony to the swagger of the Khrushchev era when the Soviet Union was winning the Space Race.

Scene from ““Chelovek Amphibia`.
[polzam.ru]

With its impressive photography and sun-drenched location shots on Baku this film can hold its head up alongside America’s The West Side Story which came out in the same period.

The doomed lovers aspect of the film seems similar too: here an outcast boy with shark gill implants loves a local maiden. In contrast with American Science Fiction films, however, this situation is not a product of nuclear radiation nor science-gone-wrong, but of benign medical intervention.

The original constumes used in `Chelovek Amphibia` on display at Lenfilm studios in St Petersburg.

Soviet Michael Crichton.

The author, Alexander Romanovich Belyaev, had grown up in a religious household in the cathedral town of Smolensk. He became a lawyer before being struck down with tuberculosis which made him dependent on care for about six years.

During this trial Belyaev encountered the writings of Verne and Wells and this fired him up to embark on a career as one of Russia’s first career science fiction authors. He was to churn out seventeen – 17!- tales in this genre.

Belyaev’s life ended in 1941 or 1942 in the town of Pushkin outside St Petersburg from lack of nutrition. He was 58.

Nevertheless he had reached a wide readership in his lifetime. Professor Dowell’s Head (1937) and The Amphibian are the ones most known to the Anglophone world but if you go onto book discussion sites you will find that Belyaev still commands a reading public outside of that, and his other books remain popular too.

An installation commemorating the film `Professor Dowell’s Testament` (Lenfilm Studio, 1984) based on Belyaev’s` “Professor Dowell’s Head`. Also on display at Lenfilm studios in St Petersburg.

Unexpected.

Belyaev had The Amphibian published in a notorious era later seen as being the onset of Stalinism. The Soviet government ended the relaxed New Economic Policy amidst a fall in grain production and a new financial slump. The buzzword of the day was `sabotage` and the first Five Year Plan was being hatched and the show trials began. Hard times.

The Amphibian, in contrast, catapults us to the fishing community of Rio de Plata near Buenos Aires. The focus, furthermore is not on new mechanics but on fantastic medical science.

Water boy.

The pearl divers are thrown into superstitious dread by the appearance of a `sea devil` in their waters. This has created a journalistic splash too.

Icthyander (the amphibian) – for it is he – a young man of about twenty, is able to spend long periods swimming underwater on account of the shark gills implanted into his body. This superpower sets him apart from normal society.

His adoptive father, Doctor Salvatore – who had saved Icthyander’s life with this surgical innovation represents the maverick medical genius ( of the kind that Boris Karloff would later portray). Nevertheless he seems saner than the conniving rabble around him and gifts the poor Mexicans with free medical help. Otherwise he is a recluse, living in a walled laboratory which he shares with his servants and sundry modified animals.

Icthyander, meanwhile is smitten with a local beauty and entangled in a hopeless love tryst. The hard-bitten pearl diving mercenaries are plotting to kidnap him and put him to their own use. It will all end in a sensational court case in which Doctor Salvatore is in the dock – and against the world…

Fable.

The detached narrative is told with spare and simple prose, reminiscent of Paul Gallico, perhaps.It could work as junior fiction, although maybe it is L. Koslenikov’s 1959 translation that makes much of the dialogue seem clunky.

The beating heart of it all is the prolonged underwater sequences where we get Icthyander’s eye on the world. Here Jacques Cousteau is anticipated in fiction.

The theme of human-animal hybrids had been dealt with earlier by Mikhail Bulgakov in Heart of a Dog (1925) but this tends to be viewed as an allegory rather than science fiction.

There also exist indelible rumours claiming that the Stalin regime was attempting to breed human-monkey hybrids for military purposes. So perhaps Belyaev was closer to the truth than he thought!

Belyaev (via Salvatore) seems to mount a defence of medical progress against the prohibitions of religion in this novel. It is not clear, however, that the author had anything more in mind than writing a ripping yarn which could whisk the reader away from the daily grind of Soviet society of that time.

Contemporary echoes.

The novel stands up better than the film which is too Old School for most people’s tastes today.

However,the science fiction geek of our time expects more involved narratives which involves multiple technological twists and turns as opposed to a one premise fable like this. The Amphibian is out of fashion.

Or is it?

Fellow baby boomers may recall an American TV show (1977-1978) called The Man From Atlantis This featured Patrick Duffy as an amphibian man. (It would be churlish to point out that one of Belyaev’s novels from 1926 is titled Posledniy Chelovek iz Atlantidi – The Last Man from Atlantis!)

Then there is Guillermo del Toro’s film The Shape of Water from two years back. The similarities between this and what has been discussed does not need to be spelt out (it even features a Soviet scientist!)

So The Amphibian remains an extraordinary novel – as extraordinary as the sad life of the man who dreamt it all up.

Chelovek Amphibia- Full movie.