‘Sputnik‘, the name of the Russian science fiction film directed by Egor Abramenko, immediately brings to mind the period of the beginning of the space era six decades ago, and the technological and political competition between the two superpowers of the time – the United States and the Soviet Union. If in terms of launching the first satellites and sending the first people to space, the Soviet Union had for a time a considerable advance, in the parallel competition, that of science fiction films, there was no doubt that the Americans dominated permanently. And yet, there was also a tradition of films about space exploration made by Russian studios and directors, materialized in successful films like ‘Planeta bur‘, and from this tradition, renewed in the recent decades, descends the film ‘Sputnik‘. Its sources of inspiration however are also space horror films like the ‘Alien‘ series. The two lessons are well learned, and we are dealing with a well-made science fiction flick. The dose of originality, at least for the spectators less familiar with this geopolitical space, can be found not necessarily in the story itself but in the placement of the action in 1983, the last decade of existence of the Soviet Union. The context in this case matters.
The hero of the film is Konstantin, a Soviet cosmonaut (Pyotr Fyodorov) who returns from a mission on the space station. Something happens during the maneuvers of re-entry into the atmosphere. Konstantin loses consciousness for a while, and when he wakes up on Earth he finds out that his mission partner has not survived. The story takes place in the Soviet Union in 1983, a time when bad news were not made public, and Konstantin instead of the expected hero reception he expected is placed isolation in a remote military base and subjected to a KGB-like investigation by colonel Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk) and his assistants. As the presence of a living extraterrestrial entity is suspected, psychologist Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) is called for help. She is of course blonde, beautiful, and brings with her a baggage of her personal traumas. If the line of the story seems familiar to you from movies like ‘Arrival‘, I think it’s not a coincidence but a direct inspiration. What is different is the atmosphere of permanent surveillance, suspicion and terror in which all the heroes live. KGB methods were still in used in those years, people were still dominated by fear, and the heroes were more likely to find allies among aliens than among their human fellows. Political thriller is added to space horror and the mix works quite well.
Oksana Akinshina succeeds to create a credible, beautiful, intelligent heroine, sensitive to psychological nuances, which can be added to the gallery of female heroes who are space researchers who at least on screens balance the gender inequality still existing in this field. But the most formidable role belongs to Fedor Bondarchuk, the son of Sergey Bondarchuk, the famous Soviet director of the second half of the last century, and himself a multilateral personality (actor, producer, director). Colonel Semiradov created by him is a ‘bad guy’ that gives shivers, acted realistically with maximum attention to detail, in the style of good Russian cinema. If this film had been made elsewhere, Max von Sydow could have been cast. The cinematography is reasonable, the special effects are not the most spectacular, but it’s hard to imagine space monsters after ‘Alien‘. The excellent sets combine a scientific research center with a prison or a concentration camp. Egor Abramenko is in his first feature film, but ‘Sputnik‘ doesn’t look like a rookie movie at all. On the contrary, I think that the director demonstrates skill in handling the tools of the profession and applying the lessons learned from different sources. I hope that he will have the chance to receive some original scripts, or maybe he will write them himself in order to be able to develop his talent creatively.