Moving with misplaced confidence between the obvious and the obscure, this one-trick-pony of a Sci-Fi thriller feels largely pointless (when you can make out what’s going on in the dank crepuscular atmosphere) before wrapping up with gory, unearned nihilism and, what else, shameless kiddie sentimentality. Naturally, it was a big Ruskie hit. It’s 1983 (the analogue technology the best idea in here since everything hands-on filmable) and two Cosmonauts are having a ‘Houston, We Have A Problem’ moment during reentry. (What’s the Russian equivalent for ‘Houston?’) Turns out, one of the men is bringing a little something back with him, an alien life form living inside his body. Can he and the Alien be safely separated? That’s the setup director Egor Abramenko washes/rinses/repeats at a faceless facility that serves as a secret space recovery gulag. Run by that prolific prodigal second-generation mediocrity of Russian Cinema, Fedor (Sergey’s scion) Bondarchuk, here only acting. (Count your blessings.) Going outside the box (literally), he calls in brilliant nonconformist doctor Oksana Akinshina after traditional approaches fail to solve the issue. Only problem, his idea of a solution may not be her idea of a solution. The deliberate pacing gives you an awful lot of time to recall how many variations of this scenario you’ve seen (two or three times a season on STAR TREK, nyet?) which wouldn’t be a problem if there was a swing to the thing, or even a bit of self-awareness that we ain’t watching Andrei Tarkovsky . . . or John Carpenter.*
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *Take a step back from this film’s curated 1983 setting to the circa 1982 alien terror of John Carpenter’s THE THING. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-thing-1982.html
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