Es ist schwer, ein Gott zu sein

Based on a novel by Arkadiy Strugatskiy, Hard to Be a God, is an incredibly radical sci-fi film that stretches the meaning of all possible descriptors. This film is not for contemporary popular audiences. This film's audience (if you could say it has one) are the squirrelly, anti-social filmophiles that are too deep down the rabbit hole to be brought back. They're the people who have spent half their lives in darkened rooms and use film as a reference point for life itself. In other words, it a movie just for me.

Knowing Hard to Be a God's production history automatically creates a modicum of goodwill towards the film. Director Aleksey German shot the film over six years and took another seven years to edit it before succumbing to heart failure at the age of 73. Yet even before his last film, his career is littered with long-gestating movies that in some cases were put on hold for years due to Soviet censorship. While the USSR ultimately crumbled 27 years ago, German's insistence in making movies his way is still met with accusations of impenetrability and art cinema navel-gazing.

Hard to Be a God's narrative is not a concern here but for the sake of cogency I'll summarize. Our protagonist Don Rumata (Yarmolnik) is a human, one of many living on another planet stuck in the middle ages. It's never made clear if he's there to help the planet's fledgling culture but what is clear is everyone seems to have a fundamental distrust of intellectuals and a hatred towards science. Perhaps because of this, Rumata has assimilated himself as a noble with God-like powers and thus is feared by all.

These God-like powers by the way include having the ability to swat spears away from his face to the gasping amazement of dim-witted centuries. It appears that Rumata has given up on logic long ago choosing instead to abuse his most loyal subjects in an attempt to make them understands the basic truths about germs, economics and whether or not fish like milk. Yet to designate Rumata a classic anti-hero would be far too simplistic. He, like the rest of the idiots populating the screen is wholly unlikable but in a drastically different way.

Hard to Be a God, to put it succinctly is two parts Andrei Tarkovsky, one part Terry Gilliam and a tiny bit of Idiocracy (2006); though summarizing German's mis en scene through text is completely impossible. His images are so textured, so grotesque and so bizarre that it is unlike anything I have ever seen let alone anything I can describe. World-building seems to be German's biggest strength. We not only see the chaos happening around the characters, we feel the coarse mud, smell the putrid bile and rotting corpses and taste the blood and sinew on the half cooked chicken they consume.

If one were to point to a glaring problem with the film it's that at nearly three hours, the film is simply too long to endure more than once. Scenes of little consequence could have easily been cut to make way for a tighter story and an ending that sticks the landing with devastating aplomb. However, say what you will about the film's leisurely pace, the constant injection of intense medieval grotesqueness supplies the film's audience with enough imagery to fill several nightmares.

While illustrating the problems of a faraway planet, Hard to Be a God is a damning condemnation of humanities struggle with its own ignorance. While certainly not for everyone, the film's warped, layered and visceral vision of medieval life is rivaled only by Marketa Lazarova (1967). Hard to Be a God is a must-watch contemporary classic whose reputation will only grow in the years to come. If you're on its wavelength, I recommend you check it out.

Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik) is a scientist from Earth based on the planet Arkanar which has refused to develop beyond an equivalent middle age state. Here, people live squalid lives covered in blood, snot, excrement and any hint of intelligence from anyone results in immediate execution. Runata has been in Arkanar for years and is viewed as a form of God. He in turn wants to move things forward, but is forbidden by his Earth bosses from doing this.

This is an extraordinary folly of a film, notable for little in the way of a plot other than revolution begats revolution and should be viewed, if you have the patience and courage to check this out, as a sensory and mostly visual experience which is where the interest lies. The sets, sounds and particularly the visuals are quite extraordinary with tunnels of mud, death and excrement seemingly stretching on forever and full of decaying people barely existing in their squalor. A very hard watch then, but unique to be sure.

Aleski German's Hard to be a God may be the most difficult science fiction film ever made. It is a film that will divide viewers. I was excited to see the film since I had liked the Strugatsky brothers' novel that the film is based upon. In addition, the film had been compared to Andrei Tarkovsky who directed one of my favorite films, Stalker, also based on a novel by Arkaday and Boris Strugatsky (Roadside Picnic). After about a half hour of watching Hard to be a God, I was somewhat less excited.

On a strictly visual level, Hard to be a God is amazing. The film takes place on a planet, similar to Earth, that is going through its middle ages. Aleski German gives the viewer this world unfiltered. The set design is the film's strongest asset. Mud, eternally gray skies, strange armor with demonic horns, and faces, faces like a out of a fresco, these keep one watching. The only two films I can think of by way of comparison are Fellini Satyricon and Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. Hard to be a God lags behind those two films (Aleski German is not on the level as Federico Fellini or Sergei Eisenstein). Furthermore, German spends so much time on the set design that he neglects the story.

The Strugatsky brothers created a story about power plays and showed how a scientist became a killer. The background was the fictional middle ages. Aleski German places the middle ages in the foreground and shoves the story into the background. True, German keeps much of the Strugatsky's story but downplays them to such a degree that viewers unfamiliar with the novel will have a hard time following it. The royal assassinations which begin the violence happen off screen. The love affair between the protagonist and the peasant girl, which leads to the turning point of the book, is barely in the film. Only one thing interests the director: the world he has created. It is an amazing world. I certainly cannot dismiss a film that looks like this.

I am glad that I struggled through all three hours of Hard to be a God once. However, I think for repeat viewings one needs to have something more than just grand, moving pictures. One needs either deep themes (like in Tarkovsky's Stalker), or an intriguing character, or simply a good story. Set design will only take a film so far.

The narrator explains to us that scientists have traveled to Arkanar, a planet still stuck in the middle ages. The society is regressing and the inhabitants have begun to murder all the intelligentsia, but the scientists are told not to intervene. Sort of like the Prime Directive. After the opening remarks, and aside from a few quips, we move permanently out of the realm of science fiction and into the world that has been created for us as we follow Don Rumata, a scientist disguised as a nobleman, as he wades through this world. And what a world it is. Mud, feces, grease, bile, and blood, are caked on to absolutely everything. Probably one of the greatest works of set design ever. With the roaming camera, it's as if the audience is a part of this diseased world, hopelessly regressing into its vile heart.

Unfortunately, there's a disappointing amount incoherence to the whole narrative. Most scenes would be over before you could piece together what had happened, and then only vaguely at that. The vision, however, of the world that Aleksei German has imagined, is totally unique and inimitable.

I think I get it... I think... Hard to Be a God is like a nightmare of living in a world of idiots. It has a feeling like drowning in mud. Of having a permanent hangover, or a sore back. Where thoughts come into your head but you're too irritated to try to communicate them. The feeling of being completely misunderstood when you're clear as day. It's really a beautiful movie to look at, and disgusting to listen to. Endless depth and texture and movement; like stirring through a stew pot looking for morsels, but finding mostly gristle, and sinew, and slime, but you're going to keep looking anyway because you're hungry.