mlwehle

At two and a half hours in length Red Silk is an hour too long. I can't reveal the end of the movie to you because I walked out after two hours after having been provided the example of another guy in my row who left - I thought at first he was headed to the men's room then realized he had his coat on.

It's just an endless series of dramatic confrontations of stereotypical characters you have seen many times before: here is the beautiful young rich girl, nobly helping her good-hearted industrialist father to do the right thing by the salt of the earth workers, but wait Oh no! Father has just been shot by the evil warlord who sneers evilly and of course is blind in one eye - because how could you have a villian who is not physically disfigured, just as how could you have a heroine or hero who are not young and good-looking? Speaking of our young good-looking hero, here he is, entering right on cue with a meet-cute.

Much doe-eyed flirting ensues, punctuated by an unending stream of shootings, explosions, scalding, stabbing, with loud dramatic music indicating crescendo after crescendo. Lots of shooting, large and small caliber weapons, auto and semi-automatic, revolvers and rifles. See people jump off a cliff. See computer graphic 1920s trains steaming through digitally produced snow. See a locomotive explode. See a train steaming through snow. See an iceboat on Lake Baikal. The train is still steaming through that snow. You've got your pick of period small arms if you have that interest. I didn't. Did I mention there is a train traveling through Siberian snow?

The plotline is straightforward - Team Good Guys must transport Super Secret Information from China to Moscow, and Team Bad Guys try to stop them. But wait! Is there A Traitor?? Our heroes have caught The Villian. Or have they?? If the viewer is aged under about 14 there may be surprises, but likely not - the "twists" here are telegraphed to the viewer and you have seen this storyline before. Many times before. It's boring.

Qas was grueling to watch from beginning to end. The cinematography was exquisite, I thought. The colors were unusually washed out, everything muted as if one were viewing old sepia-toned photographs. This was very effective in transporting the viewer to another time and place, here Kazakhstan in the 1930s. The program for the theater in which I saw Qas describes the film as a "historical horror trip in the Kazakh steppes", and Qas very truly is a sort of a horror film, with terrifying moments, suspense from the very beginning.

The suspense was very effectively maintained for me until about two-thirds of the way through the movie, after which I unfortunately found myself no longer caring so much about the principal characters. The cast is very effective, however the storyline is a seemingly unending series of "will Alim and Isatai live or die?" in a great variety of "is Alim still alive?", "has Alim run off?", "has Isatai run off?", "is that evil person really human? Are they immortal or perhaps not real, a symbolic representation of the famine? Why can't they be killed? If they can be killed why won't our protagonists kill them?"

Through more than half of the film I absolutely cared about these characters, but after a certain point my emotions had just been jerked back and forth too many times and the effect was simply waiting for the end of the film, an end which by this point the viewer knows is not going to be happy. There are a limited number of possibilities for the resolution of the central plot conflicts and as was expected the film chooses quite predictable means to wrap everything up. I was left kind of worn out, dissatisfied, wondering why I'd seen the film.

How to recommend this? "You know, the 1930s Bolshevik-created famine in Kazakhstan, like the famines in Ukraine and Russia, was horrific, really horrific. You want to know how horrible life and death in Kazakhstan in the 1930s could be? See Qas."

I watched this all the way through last night, not leaving the theater until the credits rolled in the hopes of seeing something unexpected, however these hopes were in vain. There is no need to tag my review with "Spoilers" because there is no need to write out any of the plot which might be considered a spoiler. Just imagine what the most predictable plotline might be, and at each stage write down what the least imaginative development or characterization might be, and you will have a good approximation of the film.

While the English translation of the title is "Alien" the German is "Fremdling", which I actually find more interesting, given the way transportation off Earth is depicted. Here there is an unusual and mildly interesting meld of space alien and forest horror motifs.

There is a very overt - in fact so explicit the viewer might feel hit over the head with it - parallel drawn between the alienation experienced by an actual extraterrestrial and someone who is more sensitive, compassionate, introverted than is usual in a small rural village. A madman is as harmless and innocent as a domestic animal. I found the way Prishelets unfolds this formulaic in the extreme.

The camera work was fine, the location beautiful. The child was really well cast.

Perhaps this film might be necessary watching to check it off a list of alien visitation movies, or to complete one's viewing of the director or lead's repertoire but otherwise I'm not sure what would recommend it.