Mark Reviews Movies: SPUTNIK

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 13, 2020

The humans remain at the core of Sputnik, which is a surprising development, considering that the story involves a killer alien of mysterious origin, biology, and intentions. Many a monster movie sees the humans as expendable. They often are thinly developed, do stupid things, and end up finding themselves on the business end of the creature's claws or teeth, because the monster is perceived as the more interesting character. The filmmakers have to show off the creature's design, the effects that bring it to life, and, of course, all of the cleverly sinister ways in which it can harm and kill. Someone has to be on the receiving end of the terrible and horrific carnage, and it might as well be characters that don't really matter.

The thing about Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev's screenplay, though, is that some version of this story could have been told without a killer creature in it. Their story's foundation is how these assorted characters react to something beyond their understanding and work within or rebel against a system that wants to take advantage of that unknowable something.

It could have been a weapon, a virus, a newly discovered element, some previously unknown terrestrial plant or animal, or anything of the sort. The story's groundwork, as these characters try to figure out the nature of the mysterious thing and then become entrenched in an escalating debate about what should be done with that thing, would basically remain intact. Here, the inexplicable thing of such mystery and such dangerous potential just happens to be alien.

That's not to suggest that Malovichko and Zolotarev's screenplay is routine or formulaic, as if the screenwriters are just inserting some randomly devised threat into a template plot. They've done their due diligence, providing us with well-formed characters, who investigate the mystery with intelligence and then have to react to their findings within their respective sense of morality, and a pretty fascinating creature.

The alien comes to nasty life with some impressive visual effects, but more importantly, the filmmakers, including first-time director Egor Abramenko, have given it a specifically sinister nature. Even more vital for the story being told here, the alien's nature puts forth a moral and ethical conundrum and source of debate for the characters. Some of them succeed, at least, in getting on the right side, but then they have to battle a system that only sees the destructive potential in the alien—no matter the possible cost for humanity or, for that matter, the definitive cost for a single individual.

It's 1983, and a Soviet spacecraft has landed in Kazakhstan after a period of radio silence. Only one of the two cosmonauts survived.

Meanwhile, a doctor named Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) is facing professional trouble for a recent and—let's say—controversial procedure, in which she nearly drowned a boy in order to achieve a psychological breakthrough. That unflinching mindset has caught the attention of Col. Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk). He brings the doctor to a top-secret facility where her new patient, in need of significant help, is under tight security and constant surveillance.

He's Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov), the surviving cosmonaut. After a brief meeting, Tatyana is convinced Konstantin is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but it's not that simple. In the middle of the night, the doctor watches as the unconscious cosmonaut vomits up a pale, cobra-like creature.

The initial mystery is whether it's possible to separate Konstantin from his extraterrestrial stowaway. Is it a parasite, or have the man and the alien formed a symbiotic relationship, meaning that neither can survive without the other?

What's engaging about the telling of this story is how much the characters, their conversations, and their decisions drive the narrative. Tatyana is determined to save her patient. A long scar running down her back lets us know that she has experienced some hardship or trauma in the past, and she's definitely suspicious of how insulated this facility is from the rest of the world.

Konstantin, who may or may not know about the alien living inside him, does know that something is amiss, and he's certain that whatever is happening to him is a kind of punishment for abandoning a son, whose existence he only learned about—and ignored—just before he was scheduled to go into space (Scenes with a child in an orphanage are occasionally intercut into the main story, although their true purpose is kept a secret until the very end). He keeps saying a hero of the Soviet Union shouldn't be treated in this way, probably because Konstantin fears that a man such as himself should be.

Obviously, Semiradov has some ulterior motive in mind for preserving the lives of the cosmonaut and the alien, as well as protecting whatever bond the two might have formed. We see the alien at its deadly work, of course, but for all of the bloodshed (A victim, seen through some thermal goggles, stands there, and suddenly, in an eruption of blood, he no longer has a head), there's a far more dangerous villain here. The alien, an entity driven by instinct and hunger, has an excuse. A person, who can rationalize and invent some political justification for the carnage, has none. That's definitely true of the obvious villain, but it's a far more troubling question if Konstantin is aware of the alien and what it's doing.

The alien is a key component of this story, but its primary purpose isn't to frighten—although it does. Sputnik uses the creature as a springboard for a tale about ethics and morality, about our responsibilities to our values and to others, and, above all else, about actual characters wrestling with and struggling against each other over these ideas.

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