Obitaemyy ostrov

The original book is a classic in Russia, and contains enough material (and in high enough quality) to create a Start Wars-like series of films. What was done instead was extremely fast-paced bullet-point-like re-telling of the classic story. No suspense, no tension that was present at all stages in the book.

The screenplay sticks to the original dialogue almost verbatim. A serious mistake in my view: the director seems to be afraid of the book fans, and doesn't dare to touch anything in the original. But the original dialogue was backed by a lot of description of internal thinking of the heroes - which cannot be shown on the screen. The result - the storyline is flat and uninteresting, instead of the intriguing and fascinating story in the book.

The actors' play is a total fiasco - except, maybe Strannik ("Strider") - but his role is relatively simple. Everybody else looks like they're reading from a phone book - which probably has to do with the fact that the dialogues were left as-is, see above.

I do appreciate the effort to create an "exoplanet" look of everyday things (cars, glasses, forks, plates, food, clothes etc). The things created would be unusable, but had the desired unusual look.

Overall, disappointing, and leaves a taste of a missed opportunity.

This is the first part of the two-film saga spanning over three and a half hours for both films (the second being Dark Planet: Rebellion). You have to watch both films back to back as they are one continuous story; the first one stopping in the middle of the narration.

Let's start with what's good. First, it had an impressive budget with massive sets and computer graphics which were pretty good. The story is really interesting based on Strugatsky's sci-fi novel. That's where the good ends in my view. I quite liked the sound in the film - rich full-blown sound effects. And I didn'tthink much of the music either way - it was good enough.

Now to the bad. The script of the film I thought was terrible and jerky, with some silly dialogues and so was most of the lead actors' play - as if this was a farce - totally unrealistic and unbelievable and at times plainly bad. The camera-work was average at best and so was the editing. Then there's this kung-fu which is very fairy-tailish, with crazy jumps and blows completely copying Matrix style.

I couldn't help thinking the director wasn't very original in creating the image but made it a weird mix of visual ideas taken from other films: cars looking like they are from Total Recall and Mad Max, lead actor looking like the tanned curly blond boy from The Blue Lagoon from the 80's, let alone his bad play. One of the characters - Fank, an aide to the prosecutor (by the way. played by the director in a very unfitting for him role) - is a near- copy of Gary Oldman's character Zorg in the Fifth Element driving something of a bat- mobile. Even though the movie is filled with modern GGI, it is a weird mix of things borrowed from western movies with very Russian style of actors' play, with lots of crazy overacting, yelling (there's lots of that here) and a typical Russian cinematography of the late 80s - early 90's.

Yet, the film is quite watchable and holds together the interest till the end, albeit mainly for the big money poured into it. It's certainly worth watching for the really great sci-fi story, especially if you're a sci-fi fan and like adventure and post-apocalyptic movies. All in all, It's like a great play badly acted and badly directed on a richly decorated theatre stage. Recommended.

Can't understand all this negative hysteria. Most of which is actually about nothing ("crap! oh, such a crap! totally crap!" often mentioning that Bondarchuk is a bad director). Well, I can partly understand those who admired the original book (which is really worth reading) as they may have imagined everything in different manner (this is particularly true for sci-fi adaptations). But very often I read comments of people who seemed to be negatively oriented even before they really watched the film.

The movie is not piece of art. It really takes a lot from classic sci-fi movies (from costumes designs to city views). And directing sometimes is confusing. But the film has one strong point - the plot, original story that authors reflected rather well. Special effects are good (they were performed by American specialists), acting is not bad (dramatic acting usually is not required in sci-fi action movies). In essence, the movie is good and worth seeing. Don't take negative comments for granted.

BTW as far as I know Boris Strugaztsky (the one of two brothers who is still alive) liked the adaptation.

In fact neither I nor my company had expected to be strongly impressed by the movie, when we joined to watch it on Saturday night. But having read the Strugatsky's plot-book, I was amazed that the director had followed the story so precisely. The only evident mistake was the premature assassination of one of the characters. Still the impression on the film is partial due to its halves shown with a 4 month break.

As to fighting scenes, I estimate them as dead. There was almost NO real action. The usage of Bullet Time technology of matrix all fight long turned the action into slow and boring trash. The martial arts instructors should really be ashamed of this.

There is a Russian proverb: "The first pancake is laid shapeless". It is just about the film. The spectator expected to see a miracle, because a $40million worth Russian film is considered like a $400million Hollywood movie. This expectations of a common viewer were ruined. I do hope that next attempts of Russian directors and producers to catch up with Hollywood will be more successful.

Those who have watched the film may remember the following episode – Guy and Rada are sitting in front of TV during the Entertainment Hour and goggling happily. What is entertainment on Saraksh is visions and dreams of ‘psychotic’ individuals.

It struck me that ALL the film industry the way we know it is projecting nothing but visions and dreams of certain individuals, too(and sometimes these visions and images are no better than those shown in ‘Obitaemyy ostrov’). And book fiction is the same. So what’s the difference between Earth and Saraksh in terms of culture then?

And the towers are here, too. Look around – here are the TV towers and radio towers. They project these visions and dreams to the same effect as on Saraksh. Scary, isn’t it? Where are we?

On the other hand, where would the world be without this day-dreaming and wool-gathering? Do culture and a sort of hypnotic suggestion go hand in hand? How free in our minds are we really?

Sad smile.