Krasnyy prizrak

A fresh Russian take. No epic battles, even though there´s lot of action. Just smaller groups of people fighting for survival, which brings them close to the viewer. And this mysterious "ghost". Russian western/eastern with a mystery.

There was a Yugoslav movie "Valter defends Sarajevo" - the most watched movie in China - an eastern, where the question was "who is Valter?". People grew tired of epic battles. The Russians seems to have discovered it too.

Since 2015 "Stalingrad", with it´s CGI epic battles it´s not interesting anymore. Russian cinematography has become Hollywood, soulless.

This brings it back to the roots of real people´s destiny.

Right now Russians are not being looked upon favorably. It is more the Ukranians that most of the world sympathizes with - in this case you will be rooting for the Russians though, because this plays during the second world war. When Hitler and Nazi Germany tried to take over Russia amongst other countries.

Now this is fiction of course, but that is not a bad thing at all. It makes for good entertainment - if you don't mind the violence/gun fights that erupt. Of course it is clear who we are rooting for. I was surprised a bit that there is a lot of German talking in this, but it does make sense that Germans would talk in their native language to each other. It starts off with a bang, takes a bit of time to get going again, but when it does ... well it really does give you what you could hope for. Not a masterpiece, but a really well done movie in almost every respect (no pun intended)

A stand-alone, presumably low-budget movie, showing realism to some degree, courage, fear, parts of horrors of war and the dedication and bravery that simple people not-cut-out for war went through.

It is more than mild, above-average (of course), could have cut through some dramatic and melodramatic moments to focus more on the fighting parts on both sides.

Recommended as part of Russian movies collection and library.

• Screenplay/storyline/plots: 6
• Development: 7.5
• Realism: 7
• Entertainment: 7
• Acting: 7.5
• Filming/photography/cinematography: 8
• VFX: 7.5
• Music/score/sound: 7
• Depth: 6.5
• Logic: 4.5
• Flow: 6.5
• Action/history/horror: 6.5
• Ending: 5.5.

Obviously director of this movie is a very big admirer of Tarantino's late creative work.

I thought this was pretty well produced and acted. It was a bit slow, and it did bug me a little that it was dubbed in English (even tho the dubbing was well done) and probably would have been better in Russian and German with subtitles rather than English and German. I didn't see this as a Tarantino copycat or as a "fresh take," but it's better than a lot of the recent student-level movies.