Russians Have Their Own Alien and It's Even Nastier Than the Original
Sputnik is a Russian movie inspired by the Alien franchise, which gathers a lot of positive reviews from world critics. It is the feature debut of Egor Abramenko.
Russia and science fiction has always been a mixture that ends up with something intriguing, if unknown to the western audiences, just to mention Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpieces. However, 35 years have passed since his death and Eastern cinematography has stagnated, at least in this particular genre. This creative impasse was broken by the young director Egor Abramenko. He made a short sci-fi film under the title The Passenger in 2017 and took the world by storm, showing that it is possible to create an ambitious SF project using small resources.
A few months ago the artist returned, this time with his feature debut titled Sputnik. The film was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, and since August 14 it can be watched on some VOD platforms in North America and selected European Union countries. The film received 89% of positive reviews from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Abramenko spoke about his production in IndieWire:
“We wanted to combine a very common setting for the Russian audiences, which is the U.S.S.R. and the ’70s and ’80s and the Soviet space program, obviously, and we wanted to bring these elements from outer space there. Sci-fi is a rare genre for the Russian film industry.”
The director does not hide the fact that his great inspiration was the original Alien directed by Ridley Scott:
“I saw ‘Alien’ when I was a kid. I saw just parts of it. Obviously I was a kid, but sometimes it was on TV and I just saw snippets that terrified me. I thought, someday, I want to do something like that. I fell in love with this space, sci-fi, horror genre.”.
The creator also talked about how he came up with the idea for the appearance of the monster from his movie:
“We’d been experimenting a lot with different animals, and combining their different elements and parts, and trying to come up with something original that would amaze the audience, and that would serve the story needs [...] We were thinking a lot about how he moves, how he crawls throughout the space. I sent over to the animators this reference of Komodo dragons, these huge lizards, and I was really inspired by how they move in real life,”.
