Once in the Desert

This is for me yet another brilliant Russian film with Hollywood blockbuster quality. The shot sequence for the first landmine explosion a few minutes into the movie showed me all I needed to know how brilliantly made the rest of the movie will be. If you have enjoyed other Russian movie industry cuts such as The Balkan Line, Sputnik and Russkiy Reyd then this one will definitely be worth watching for you. For any enthusiast of military movies with a touch of the Eastern influence I highly recommend this! Once In The Desert is every bit a 10/10 production if you watch it sincerely without any pre-programmed bias.

This is excellent entertainment, fantastic acting, and with very realistic and creepy tension. I saw it in Russian with subtitles, and I suggest you do the same, something is always lost in dubbed translation.

I cannot fault anything with this movie. It is all good, great or excellent. If I would mention something negative it is that they just did not nail it completely. I cannot put my finger on it, perhaps its the Russian language? Or perhaps this needed a higher budget? I am not sure, but I felt like something was missing or not perfect and that is why I am giving this great movie a 9/10 ( a weak nine) and not a higher score.

This also feels very fresh, new, and interesting. This is what is needed in the realm of entertainment, more sources of it. For too long Hollywood has ruled supreme, only slightly challenged by Bollywood and a few independent movies from Europe. China had something going for a while, but I have not seen a good movie from the Chinese for many years, so this feels great and refreshing. Hopefully we get more of this from the Russians, and from the rest of the world too. We need more culture and more levels of entertainment.

I highly recommend this. Top3 best movies of the year, and this should win plenty of awards, but sadly its Russian and, yea, well, the world is how it is...

Palmyra/Once In The Desert is a interesting, enjoyable movie about the Russian intervention in Syria or more specifically about the life of Captain Shaberov a D'Miner/Sapper. He is an experienced D'Miner who is training a group of Syrian soldiers in D'Mining. The storyline is really good, it has a pretty major plot twist later on that the viewer won't see coming, and that will have you saying "Why? Just why?", like seriously when it was revealed I was so sad and heartbroken. Still a solid, enjoyable storyline following the adventures of Captain Shaberov in Syria.

The movie even has a really nice romantic arc to it, I would have thought trying to include a romance and romantic storyline would take away from the rest of the movie and the seriousness of the job and dangers a sapper must face, but the romance angle was worked in really well in such a way that while you may be a bit surprised at first like I was you'll really like it as well looking back at it.

The cast all seemed to fit their roles really well and put on enjoyable performances. Aleksandr Robak who plays Captain Shaberov is does a good job portraying a veteran sapper, father trying to reconnect to his daughter and a man who finds love in the middle of the Syrian war. Pavel Chinaryov is an annoying rookie captain, but by the end he isn't to bad and the actor does a good job.

Ekaterina Nesterova plays Jamilya, A Syrian woman and Captain Shaberov's love interest. The actress is Russian(I'm assuming by her name) yet she plays a Syrian woman and does a really good job of it as well, albeit one who says her father is Russian and her mother Syrian therefore she is mixed. She also looks really middle eastern/Syrian to me in the movie and I wouldn't have guessed that she was a Russian actress at all. So really good job overall with her casting and the performance she delivered.

The fighting scenes, explosions, blood and guts and all that, looks and feels very real, so props to the director and team there as well. Great VFX and SFX.

Anyway overall Palmyra is a enjoyable war movie that does a great job of depicting the life of a Russian Sapper in Syria. It has a good storyline, a lovely romantic angle, great fight scenes, explosions and the like. A well deserved 8/10 from me.

P. S. I watched a English dubbed version of the movie unfortunately. The Russian parts were dubbed into English but the Arabic parts are all still in Arabic thankfully. Would definitely have preferred watching the film in it's original language though.

Usually, I would rate something like this as 8, but with all hate to this movie, due to its origin, it deserves 10.... just to get to the overall real value of it.

It's really worth watching it. It got the atmosphere... of war and how ugly it is. It got real people, whom you do believe and worry about. And it's more or less how things do work in this kind of world.

Some things are predictable, some are not. The main character never dies in the movie length, but we do have a variety of secondary characters, and their survival will always keep you on the edge.

Overall - it's a good movie, about good people, who know what to do in their... job... a bit silly in other things in their life.... just like all of us.

English dubbed russian movies, seems like the producers think we are all analphabets that cant read cc's, stupid that is...

but if you like horendous explotions, insane shootouts and tactics on the battle filed combined with the love of russian military machine stuff then this film will fit like a glove. The rest is just palmyrian camels of a lovestory that tries to creep through the needlehead opening or trying to get laid the alibaban way, its dry and coarse as a petrified forest in the desert, so go for the explosives, theyre the best.

Russians usually do make good war movies, but this syrian conflict commemoration was far from what i expected. It lasts 30 minutes too long thinks the grumpy old man, but a small recommend still.