When I first caught the trailer for SPUTNIK (2020), I was pretty darn excited. The old Soviet Union, a ship crashing with alien life aboard? Count me in. Unfortunately, I never did find it, and it slipped off my radar. A short time ago, I found it for rent and grabbed the chance to watch it. Totally worth the wait: I loved this one.
The movie starts with two Soviet Union cosmonauts preparing to bring their spacecraft home in 1983. Unfortunately, something comes home with them. While a commander lies to the regime, which lies to the citizenry about the fate of the cosmonauts, a controversial doctor is recruited to come to a secluded facility. There, she learns one of the cosmonauts is being held against his will and studied. Her task: separate him from the thing that lives inside him. The title, SPUTNIK, refers not to the 1956 space launch but to its literal Russian meaning, which is “companion.”
I loved everything about this movie, from the drab dystopian and analog aesthetic to the faceless soldiers who seemed to be everywhere to the creature itself. Thematically, the film explores how an oppressive system coerces and controls through fear, how people can be selfish to get along or take risks to do the right thing, and the stupidity of a system itself when it’s scared and therefore tends to regard everything as either a threat or a weapon.
The first two acts are almost perfect in my view, as the doctor discovers the nature of the parasite, how it feeds, and what the base’s commander wants. The last act becomes a bit convoluted, and the protagonist comes off a little erratic and coldly aloof, but overall it didn’t detract much for me. My only real peeve is it’s in Russian; while I don’t mind subtitles, in fact I enjoy hearing a foreign film in its original language without what often ends up bad dubbing, the subtitling had a small type size, making it a bit hard to both read and watch at the same time.
Overall, again, I loved SPUTNIK and would recommend it as a very cool and different little sci-fi horror gem.
Leave a Reply