Film: Paradox Soldiers
Release date: 21st February 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 98 mins
Director: Oleg Pogodin & Dmitri Voronkov
Starring: Aleksei Barabash, Semyon Belotserkovskiy, Dmitri Dyachuk, Ekaterina Klimova, Ivan Krasko
Genre: Action/Drama/Sci-Fi/War
Studio: Metrodome
Format: DVD
Country: Russia
In this follow up to director Oleg Pogodin’s 2008 time travelling/war movie crossover, We Are The Future, four modern day citizens of the former USSR gain a closer understanding of the nature of war than they had bargained for.
The film is set in the Ukraine, at the site of the Battle of Brody, a fight which proved to be pivotal to the Russian struggle to push back the German forces along the eastern front. The battle took place between the Red Army and divisions of the German army, including an SS unit, who were comprised mainly of Ukrainian volunteers. Representatives from St Petersburg and Kiev arrive to participate in a re-enactment of the battle, with the Ukrainians taking the part of the volunteers who had fought for the Germans.
Of the four morally unscrupulous treasure hunters from Pogodin’s first film, only two make their reappearance in Paradox Soldiers. Sergei Filatov is now a sensitive professor of history, while Oleg Vasil’ev has grown out his skinhead but retains his air of oafish stupidity. These two join the re-enactment as members of the Red Army, rapidly coming into real-life conflict with two of the Ukrainian volunteers. Taras is arrogant and scornful of the Russians’ attitude of reverence towards the sacrifices made during the war, and Serji is a spoilt, cowardly mummy’s boy with a moptop haircut, dependent on Taras to protect him.
When the first night of the students’ encampment is marked by a death metal concert and a punch up, historical enlightenment seems off the agenda. But a freak accident throws our four heroes together, as they find themselves blasted fifty years back into the past, having to adapt and survive to escape imprisonment or death at the hands of the Ukrainian Paramilitary Army, the Germans and the Russians…
From this point, events move quickly and towards a predictable moral outcome. The Russians and Ukrainians must overcome their mutual antagonism in order to survive, and a genuine comradeship emerges between them. If this all sounds reminiscent of a boy’s own ripping yarn or a PS2 game, depending on your age, then that’s not too far from the truth. The climactic scene of the characters’ propulsion into the past is devised as a flame filled, bullet time explosion, honing in on the ominously loud ticking of Filatov’s wristwatch, in case any of us were too slow to pick up on the dramatic implication of the scene. Rock music soundtracks the action, from the four companions’ headlong flight through the forest from the Germans to their madcap assault on a strategically important building. There is a genuine sense of tension and excitement in many scenes.
But the tone of the film fluctuates so wildly that it’s hard to know how seriously we’re meant to take any of this. This unevenness is reflected in the various characters. Filatov broods mournfully upon Nina, a beautiful nurse from the Russian medical corps. Without the back-story of the first film, it’s hard to gauge the source of this obsession, and when Nina makes an appearance, sporting an awful lot of eyeliner for a battlefield, her simpering is an incongruous object for Filatov’s soulful devotion.
Aleksei Barabash gives a powerful performance as the belligerent Taras. In his opening scenes, he seems to be merely an arrogant thug, but once transposed to the arena of the real war, he quickly – so quickly as to be rather mystifying – shows himself to be thoughtful, quick-witted and courageous. Lumbering Oleg is so dense that when Taras tells a suspicious Russian commander that Oleg’s taciturnity is the result of concussion, it doesn’t require any acting to overcome the commander’s scepticism. But when tested in conflict, Oleg displays strength and almost suicidal loyalty, like the faithful horse Boxer in Animal Farm, providing the brawn to Filatov’s brain. The weedy Stupka also undergoes a predictable transformation. His clownishness adds humour – when escaping the Germans, he asks, “What will I tell my mum? She hasn’t even been born yet.” In the end, he also discovers a previously unsuspected inner mettle, and stands alongside his comrades as they take up arms in the heat of the battle.
There is a strange disconnection between the puerile behaviour of the characters – with the exception of Filatov - in the modern day and the depth of character they display during the scenes in 1944. And no folks, this isn’t just because they’ve learnt a valuable lesson during their time travelling escapades. Without giving anything away, the asinine cheesiness of the final section, complete with air punching and yet more simpering, brings the film’s rating down a notch all by itself.
It’s hard to know what the creators of Paradox Soldiers were aiming for. Barabash and Petrenko bring gravitas to their roles, and there is undoubted technical skill shown – for example, a continuous ninety second shot which swerves through the trenches and follows the aerial path of explosives. Pathos is conveyed in the scenes of civilians retreating from the devastation of the war, or terrified and at the mercy of hate-filled nationalists. However, all this is undermined by humour which sometimes works well in relieving the tension, but at other times seems inadvertent. There’s a slapstick quality to some of the fist fights, which is laugh out loud funny in one scene – apparently deliberately so – but in another case, that of the fight between the students early in the film, just laughably bad. Some of the special effects look dated and inappropriate. Taras kicks over a war memorial, then looks round fearfully as mist emerges in slow motion from the fallen memorial, a hackneyed motif which would fit better in a tongue in cheek horror. The fact that Paradox Soldiers was rejected for distribution by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture indicates that at least in some quarters it’s been interpreted as an offensive portrayal of Ukrainian nationalism, if not a sabre rattling glorification of Russian military history.
Despite its daft elements, Paradox Soldiers isn’t unenjoyable in a gung ho fashion. Its humorous touches work with varying success, and a decent standard of performance and production design lend an air of tense reality to its depiction of battle. But its heavy-handed treatment of the morality of warfare doesn’t bear much examination, and its uneven tone and the bizarre juxtaposition of elements from different genres makes you wonder what its creators were thinking. KR
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