Director: Fedor Bondarchuk
Year: 2018
Country: Russia
Alternate Titles: Prityazhenie
Genre: Science Fiction
Plot:
In the middle of Moscow, a teen and her friends are among the numerous witnesses to an extraterrestrial space ship crashing into the middle of the city, devastating the area and killing many. In the aftermath of the contact, despite reassurances from the aliens they want to repair the ship and leave the planet, the rest of the city is torn in their grief for remembering the dead as well as outrage at their mere presence on Earth which only intensifies when a group of her friends manage to bring one of the unconscious aliens to a local hideout. When she finds out their true intentions and how they function in their society, she grows closer to them which causes even more strife amongst the citizenry who want them to leave the planet any way possible. As both sides gather their forces to ensure they get what they want, the outbreak of an interstellar war looms in the balance forcing everyone to take a side in the galactic conflict.
This turned out to be a highly enjoyable and intriguing effort. One of the more intriguing aspects to the film is the ability to introduce an interesting and wholly enjoyable storyline throughout here. The backdrop of the alien invasion and the impact it plays on humanity, bringing about their conflicting emotions as to whether or not they're hostile, makes for a rather novel concept of an invasion to where the impact on the culture around the society will be changed. The military presence here in the aftermath speaks volumes as does the desire to study them and their intentions, making for a wholly realistic scenario to an invasion that manages to include the usual militaristic red-tape and bureaucracy that normally arrives in the wake of such instances a pretty enjoyable setup here.
The other intriguing factor about the storyline here is the fact that this turns into quite an emotional existential outlook on the way humanity views itself. Focusing on the outrage caused by the inadvertent destruction of their arrival that provides the impetus for this one to look at the nature of humanity when entering into such a conflict, which brings about rather interesting social commentary that goes quite a long way to telling the truth about the nature of humanity. Quick to judge, even quicker to impose their own resolutions onto others and immediately falling to violence instead of rationality, empathy and understanding all come into play here with the way her friends spark the lead of the anti-alien movement to kick them off compared to her who tries to genuinely help them resulting in her falling in love with one. That this is summarily brought up and dismissed against them in one fell swoop towards the very end in the spaceship waiting for the outcome of their treatment to help his daughter brings this full-circle towards that.
As well, there's also the strong and wholly impressive special effects. The action is driven by this feature, including the start of the film showing the strange craft approaching Earth while in outer space as the spiraling, spinning arms that surround the ship in a circular pattern look far more realistic than expected. The cold, metallic design and large central eye-like structure they orbit are incredibly detailed and realistically integrated as the fluid movements truly give off the extraterrestrial feel. Included here is the aliens themselves, or at the very least their outer suits that are incredibly anthropomorphic and allow for a stunning mixture of humanistic as well as animalistic movement which are stunningly realized and captured throughout here. It allows the film to believably generate several full-on enjoyable action scenes that are incredibly entertaining, from the full-scale destruction that occurs once the flaming ship lands in the city knocking out rows of buildings in a storm of intense debris or the ground-war at the end with the two sides engaging in close-quarters combat together which brings about some intense and explosive action that mixes practical stunts with effective, jaw-dropping CGI.
While there's indeed a large amount of stellar qualities present, the film does stumble in one main aspect. The story never makes it quite clear why the entire purpose of this one takes so many drastic and completely unneeded sideplots that are absolutely irrational and illogical in such a setting. The idea of this random teen, even one who has a father in the military, being given access to high-class security and restricted access points in the military compounds simply reeks of plot contrivance to move things along without coming up with a normal reasoning why, especially after all the accumulating incidents where it's clear that she's involved with something fishy after the third or fourth time they apprehend her in the vicinity of something. That carries over into the finale where it turns into a standard troubled character motivations which is so badly illogical and screams out due to being so incoherent when everything in the film could've been avoided had it handled their characters differently. This is really the only area where the film fails and holds it back somewhat slightly, although these aren't detrimental compared to the rest of the film's positives.
While this one ends up containing plenty of exciting and extremely intriguing elements based on a large number of positives, there's still some minor issues present here that does crop up from time-to-time. Give this a chance if you're interesting in the concept, intrigued about foreign variations of this style or curious about this overall, while those that aren't wowed by the positives should heed caution here.
Comments
Post a Comment