The new big budget Russian sci-fi movie – “Inhabited Island” (Obitaemyi Ostrov) – promises to be a treat for fans of the genre.
Russia’s most expensive movie ever – production and promotional budget is nudging $40 million (£27 million) – is due to be released across the country on January 1st 2009.
Judging by the invitation-only preview I attended this afternoon at Moscow’s Oktyabr cinema, it is going to be hit in Russia, where many of the viewers will be familiar with the Strugatsky Brothers 1968 novel on which it is based.
Written at a time when science fiction offered an acceptable way of writing about subjects that could not be broached in more political ways, “Inhabited Island” imagined a far away world, far in the future where a dreadful junta of five sadistic and scheming leaders keep a planet’s population subjugated through fear and mind control.
A joy-riding young space traveler from earth crash lands on the planet and finds his fate intimately interwoven with the planet’s.
The movie – which will be released in two parts in Russia, although possibly a shorter single version internationally – is very dark, very Russian.
Without having seen a subtitled version, even though my Russian is good enough to follow much of the dialogue, it is not fair to give here more than a first impression.
Rich in detail, splendid sets, costumes and computer graphics, the film moves at a pace that leaves little time to fully appreciate the alternative world its makers have created.
With liberal nods to Fritz Lang’s 1927 futuristic classic “Metropolis” and Ridley Scott’s 1982 “Blade Runner” (the crowded market scenes, drenching rain and heavy, dark sense of concrete and steel particularly), and the Wachowski Brother’s 1999 “The Matrix”, “Inhabited Island” is bound to create excitement well beyond the normal sci-fi fan niches.
With a world oligarchy cast in way that brings elements of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union – not to mention the current day intrigues of the Kremlin and other ‘real’ world powers – “Inhabited Island” is subtly subversive in a way that marks it as very different from other recent Russian sci-fi blockbusters, “Day Watch” and “Night Watch”.
Producer Alexander Rodnyansky – who joined the small crowd of a dozen or so Moscow film critics and agents today, along with director Fedor Bondarchuk – has taken a big, brave punt on a film that opens at a time when the current world climate does not always seem so far from that of the imagined far away world of 2157 in “Inhabited Island”.
