Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
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Vasiliy Stepanov | ... | Maksim |
Yulia Snigir | ... | Rada (as Yuliya Snigir) | |
Pyotr Fyodorov | ... | Guy | |
Sergey Garmash | ... | Zef | |
Yuriy Kutsenko | ... | Vepr (as Gosha Kutsenko) | |
Aleksey Serebryakov | ... | Strannik | |
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Mikhail Evlanov | ... | Chachu |
Andrey Merzlikin | ... | Fank | |
Anna Mikhalkova | ... | Ordi | |
Maksim Sukhanov | ... | Papa | |
Fedor Bondarchuk | ... | Prokuror (as Fyodor Bondarchuk) | |
Yuriy Tsurilo | ... | General | |
Kirill Pirogov | ... | Svyokor | |
Evgeniy Sidikhin | ... | Test | |
Aleksey Gorbunov | ... | Shurin |
On the threshold of 22nd century, furrowing the space, protagonist from the Free Search Group makes emergency landing on an unknown planet where he must stay. People who are living on this planet have remained at the stone level of the 20th century, with its social problems, miserable ecology and shaky world... Written by egalogs
The original book is a classic in Russia, and contains enough material (and in high enough quality) to create a Start Wars-like series of films. What was done instead was extremely fast-paced bullet-point-like re-telling of the classic story. No suspense, no tension that was present at all stages in the book.
The screenplay sticks to the original dialogue almost verbatim. A serious mistake in my view: the director seems to be afraid of the book fans, and doesn't dare to touch anything in the original. But the original dialogue was backed by a lot of description of internal thinking of the heroes - which cannot be shown on the screen. The result - the storyline is flat and uninteresting, instead of the intriguing and fascinating story in the book.
The actors' play is a total fiasco - except, maybe Strannik ("Strider") - but his role is relatively simple. Everybody else looks like they're reading from a phone book - which probably has to do with the fact that the dialogues were left as-is, see above.
I do appreciate the effort to create an "exoplanet" look of everyday things (cars, glasses, forks, plates, food, clothes etc). The things created would be unusable, but had the desired unusual look.
Overall, disappointing, and leaves a taste of a missed opportunity.