Sputnik Parent Guide

Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) is a talented doctor, but her unusual methods have brought her to the attention of a professional board which threatens to either dismiss her or report her to the state prosecutor. Given how the state prosecutor behaves in the Soviet Union in 1983, Tatyana is looking for a way out – and just so happens to bump into Colonel Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk), a mysterious officer who needs Tatyana’s approach to medical risk-taking. But once she’s at Semiradov’s secret facility in Soviet Kazakhstan, she finds that things are more complicated than she had anticipated. An injured cosmonaut, Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotor Fyodorov) the only survivor from his mission, is completely unable to recall what caused the spacecraft to malfunction or what killed his co-pilot. Unfortunately, the answer to those mysteries puts them all at risk…

I love a good creepy alien movie, and this is at least a mostly decent creepy alien movie. It’s a pretty well saturated genre, but Sputnik puts enough of a new gloss on the old formula to keep me engaged. A huge part of that fresh spin is the fact that this is a Russian film – the Ministry of Culture even appears in the production credits – and you almost never get to see Cold War movies told from the Soviet point of view and made in the former Soviet Union. It’s a viewpoint you don’t typically get in the West.

I’m going to go way out on a limb and say this isn’t a kids movie. Unless you’re raising your kids on a steady diet of Alien and maybe The Thing, the exceptionally graphic and alarmingly frequent violence isn’t going to do them any favors. Alternatively, if you really want to give your kids nightmares, this is probably an awesome choice, because apart from the violence and some brief partial nudity, there are comparatively light content concerns with this film. It’s really unusual to see a movie with such graphic violence and so little profanity – maybe the English subtitles miss out, but since I don’t speak Russian, I have no way to know. (It’s possible that the dubbed version has more swearing.) The violence, however, is enough to push this into Restricted territory, so this is definitely not family movie night fodder.

Sure, this isn’t hugely different from other alien/parasite style movies – but it is fresh enough to be worth a watch if you’re a fan of the genre. Absolutely soaked in a depressing (and unmistakably Soviet) atmosphere, dripping gore (and no small amount of mucus), and pleasantly tense, Sputnik is a good time…relatively speaking. Maybe don’t watch this one with a snack, though.