Zapreshchyonnaya realnost

The dazzling, Russian-made, sleekly super-charged, science fiction, thrill-overkill, 'Zapreshchyonnaya realnost' aka 'The Interceptor' (2009) is a frequently exciting, supremely polished, visually spectacular, Tech-noir/action extravaganza that, entirely curiously, has yet to establish much of a fan base who would vociferously extol the film's all-too considerable merits! While the convoluted narrative of crypto-evil corporations and their gleefully grandiose, internecine struggles for total world dominance/annihilation is, to be fair, entirely derivative, and not just a little bit uninspired, and while, regretfully, 'The Interceptor' occasionally over-eggs certain sequences, thereby stretching all plausibility to the giddiest extremes of B-Movie absurdity, it is never once dull or sickly-sentimental, and for this most welcome boon, I can readily forgive these momentary lapses into tired sci-fi tropisms. And having 'The Interceptor' generously endowed with a suitably masculine male protagonist in the steel-thewed, heroically-handsome figure of fleet-footed special forces butt-kicker, Matvey Sobolov,(Igor Petrenko), merely increased the sinuous authenticity of this altogether exhilarating, gravity-defying, 'super-dude against the nefarious machinations of some esoteric, supernatural, super-weapon wielding villain' adrenalized action-fest, that any less judgmental fan of 'Nemesis', 'Day Watch' or 'Equilibrium' might well enjoy as much as I did!

I love nightwatch/daywatch and picked this up in the supermarket-what a mistake. The story is confusing and nothing or no-one is ever explained. the music is plain even during the action scenes, and not one person in the film had to 'act'. what little dialogue there is is churned out in monotone sentences, and there is no character development. I had to stop this before the end. I was a little tipsy but 15 mins into the film i was stone sober, so i was certainly trying to figure out what was going on. The special effects are pretty dodgy and over used to fill time it seems, at least in nightwatch(which had similar effects) they were put to good use. i wouldn't recommend this film to anyone unless you fancy a dreamy bit of background noise. Sorry if this sounds harsh but i couldn't find anything good about it, waste of £5.

This is a truly awful film, that has to be said, but somehow they've put so much energy into the special effects that it becomes sort of compelling, in the sense you want to see how bad it can get. The plot is a very basic, juvenile fantasy of good and evil. In this case evil in corrupt politicians who are run by evil forces from another dimension opposed by the good guys, a joint effort of a rebellious vigilante group, a lone wolf special ops agent and som white magic types that look like they may have escaped from a Canadian spin-off of Lord of the Rings together with the cheesy green screen backgrounds. The overall effect is rather as if you would start off with a Turkish soap opera, add some Transporter, a dash of The Matrix, some snatches from Counterstrike. It has a certain entertainment value if you don't have to pay for it.

Originally known as Smersh XXI but retitled Zapreshchennaya Realnost (Forbidden Reality) and then released internationally as THE INTERCEPTOR (2009), Konstantin Maximov's film has drawn comparisons with the likes of THE MATRIX trilogy (1999, 2003, 2003) and the BOURNE trilogy (2002, 2004, 2007) and it's entirely fair. It also reminded me a little of DISPLACED (2006). A simple action movie with a convoluted plot involving layers of reality and supernatural fighting skills, it's another example of Russia's attempts to emulate Hollywood blockbusters in their own unique way. Less unique than either NIGHT WATCH (2004) or DAYWATCH (2006), INTERCEPTOR is almost incomprehensible, it's only because elements are so familiar that you're able to follow it. While it has its flaws, it's under 90 minutes (is there a longer cut?) and there's plenty of action (although I feel the intensity of these sequences would have been improved with some better sound design) and I feel inclined to watch it again to try and figure out what the hell is going on.

While I have enjoyed some of Russian movies made in latter years, and grew to very much like some of Russian actors and actresses, I could not possibly say the same about this movie. This movie originally had quite a good potential - some pretty nice sci-fi hero storyline to begin with (and don't tell me that books are better, much better - I already know that and that is true in almost every case), a quite strong young Russian actor for a lead (Petrenko), but the result is more than lousy. Kind of the movie was about nothing. Did anyone get what it was about or what it was meant to be about? I did not. And all the time during viewing it felt as if I was wasting my time, which was quite true at the end. Here I must agree with the other comment on this movie that the visual greyness throughout the movie was tiresome and rather annoying. If that was part of FXs introduced to create some special atmosphere, then it totally and ultimately failed. Actually this movie IMHO failed in every possible aspect as it haven't delivered a story nor a likable characters (I doubt if even the very true fans of actors' could possible have found anything at all to enjoy this time).

For a conclusion, I would like to say here that I doubt no more in Russians' abilities to make a good FXs, but respectively they also could realize that strong FXs and nothing to support 'em cannot make a trick of a good movie no more. We've seen that in Daywatch and Nightwatch, but to watch so many movies with FXs and non-existent story lines is getting just too much. Move on, please.