The Red Ghost

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.

I was quite impressed with every aspect of this production. I seen a number of Russian films and they do seem to insist on quality work. Artistic, realistic abilities are not short here. The plot is straight forward but the directing makes it so interesting, one yearns for the next scene, trying to anticipate upcoming action. Sets are real looking because there's no stage shooting, all on location. Props are as real as you can get but I'm sure someone can find a discrepancy. Wardrobe is accurate to the time and place as far as I can tell. But isn't that what the director wants? A believable story. One that just might be true?

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.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Second World War became the one and only unifying idea of the modern Russian society. Virtually everyone agrees that this war was a defensive and a fair one.

The Russian government lacking in it's own unifying ideas leans heavily ( i would say somewhat too heavily) on this background and tries to unite the Russian society based on the heroic war which ended 75 years ago.

Therefore there is a multitude of new movies about the War and that period, mostly these are well funded by the state and yet they are sadly lacking in anything original.

Now, the Red Ghost (Krasnyy Prozrak) is very different. It is a relatively small in scale movie, with a very fresh perspective.

It hails an unknown soldier, who fights for his home country without any hope for recognition. Without any hope for anything really other than killing as many enemies as possible.

It is an "eastern" and in many ways it is quite similar to 'westerns": there is silent lone hero, there is a clearly defined main antagonist and there is a final stand down between the two.

Even the music, while being original is quite vividly reminiscent of Ennio Morricone's immortal melodies.

Perhaps this is not a movie, which you would would want to see repeatedly, and it is not perfectly made. Most of the characters remain just illustrations of the archetypes they symbolize, such as, for example an old village hunter, a dying ranking officer, a talkative joker of a soldier and so on. We do not really get to know any of them.

But this may not necessarily be something of a shortcome - the nature of an eastern (and western) is always like that - ultimately the fight matters more than the characters.

In certain scenes the camera work may have been better. And yet the fight scenes are filmed really well, one does feel the tension of the fight happening on the screen.

The movie certainly manages to deliver it's message and it does so elegantly. There is an uplifting feeling after watching the film.

Highly recommended.

Goofy and aloof with some moments of humor, spaghetti western themed WORLD WAR 2 movie, a Fresh look with how the Nazi's and the Russian dealt with one another in war, loved the action sequences in this film, it had a go for broke attitude with the violence near the conclusion which helped this movie a lot in my opinion, the Red Ghost was a badass when he shows up, but the Russian villagers who were stuck on the farm stole the movie, yes it borrows from previous films, yes it's a little too modern with the dialog, but that not a bad thing, if you can find this film, and have free time to watch an international action film, this one is not bad.