LIVING UNIVERSE

Narrator: Dr Karl Kruszelnicki
Featuring: Natalie Batalha, Gentry Lee, Avi Loeb, Karin Öberg, Sar Seager, Steve Squyres and the voice of Prof. Tamara Davis.

Rating: 4/5

Melding mesmerizing CGI visions of interstellar starscapes and alien worlds with earthbound wisdom and state-of-the-art tech provided by some of the greatest minds in space science, the Australian/French co-production Living Universe will leave both dreamers and doers pining for what the future folds.

Not for the first time in movie history, posing the question ‘Are we alone?’ proves to be the entry point for a terrific film experience. Mulling over the connotations of that questions are the likes of Steve Squyres, NASA Space Science Advisory Committee chairperson; Swedish astrochemist Karin Öberg; JPL Chief Engineer Gentry Lee, currently serving NASA’s Planetary Flight Systems Drectorate; astrophysicist Natalie Batalha, Mission Scientist on NASA’s Kepler initiative; and, Avi Loeb, Harvard’s Professor of Science.

As the collective might of this academic hive-mind ponders the hows, where and whys of intergalactic exploration, the journey of the A.I.-piloted spacecraft Aurora to the distant ‘exoplanet’ Minerva B unfolds, 150 years from now. These sequences are gorgeous flights of fancy, conjured by effects gurus tasked with crafting galaxy clouds, meteor storms and, ultimately, ‘flesh and bone’ manifestations in answer to the question originally posed.

The production stops short of going full-Avatar; to undertake a dirt-to-civilization exercise in world building is best left to the budgets of Hollywood studios. Living Universe instead imagines that the very first moments of contact and discovery, enabled by drone-tech and spider-bot androids, will be at a base biological level but no less wonderful or awe-inspiring because of it.   

The narration of Aussie celeb-scientist Dr Karl Kruszelnicki will play better with international audiences; local patrons may be too familiar with his floral-shirt public persona to fully accept him in such an earnest mood. That said, his contributions clearly convey information and succinctly posit theories and conjecture that may be otherwise daunting for non-space types.

Emerging as the most engaging presence is Australian astrophysicist Tamara Davis (pictured, above), who vocalises the A.I. operating system ‘Artemis’ aboard the Aurora. Unlike ‘Mother’, the femme-voiced super-computer of the Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s Alien, Davis’ cyber-conscience proves empathetic, inquisitive and ideal as Earth’s ambassador at the point of ‘first contact’.

The WORLD PREMIERE Australian Season of LIVING UNIVERSE commences August 9 at Event Cinemas nationally; from August 11 at Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace (Sydney); and, from August 30 at IMAX Melbourne Museum. Check the official website for other venues.

STALINGRAD 3D

Stars: Mariya Smolnikova, Yanina Studilina, Thomas Kretschmann, Pyotr Fyodorov, Sergey Bondarchuk, Dmitriy Lysenkov, Andrey Smolyakov, Aleksey Barabash, Heiner Lauterbach and Oleg Volku.
Writers: Sergey Snezhkin, Ilya Tilkin.
Director: Fedor Bondarchuk.

Screening courtesy of the 2014 Russian Revolution Film Festival.

Rating: 2.5/5

As David Ayer’s Fury, featuring Brad Pitt and a tank full of combat movie stereotypes rolls through Australian cinemas, so to does Russian cinema’s own equally grand and cornball World War II melodrama, Stalingrad. Despite some stunningly realised technical work, Fedor Bondarchuk’s action-packed opus creaks under a rigidly antiquated narrative that bears a far closer pedigree to Michael Bay’s fanciful Pearl Harbour than Steven Spielberg’s gritty standard-bearer, Saving Private Ryan.

At US$30million (and with Columbia Pictures international distribution arm attached), it is one of largest production’s ever undertaken by the Russian film sector. Yet scripters Sergey Snezhkin’s and Ilya Tilkin’s dialogue and drama never come close to matching the visuals crafted by Bondarchuk’s production design team. Topped-and-tailed by an expensive Japanese earthquake sequence so as to create an unnecessary flashback device, audiences are then plunged into Stalingrad 1942, specifically a section of the city that has been cut-off after the German troops ignite vast fuel supplies (the sight of Russian troops bursting through walls of flame, fully ablaze and impervious to pain, gives an early indication as to the purely cinematic degree of heroism to be expected over the next 2 hours.)

Holed up in the crumbling remnants of a once opulent tenancy are five rugged, chummy Russian soldiers, led by the scowling, war-weary Gromov (Pyotr Fyodorov). Much like the societal cross-section represented by Pitt’s tank-crew, Gromov’s men are all types yet act as one; they find one more thing to bond over in the form of 18 year-old Katya (Mariya Smolnikova), a doe-eyed and determined lass who also happens to be a crack-shot with a telescopic sniper’s rifle.

The German forces are represented by Kapitan Kahn (Thomas Kretschmann, Europe’s hammiest leading man; see Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D), who keeps the pretty blonde peasant Masha (Yanina Studilina) hidden away to rape at his whim while also falling in love with her, and Khenze (Heiner Lauterbach), the bald tyrant of a head officer, who spits out some of the film’s unintentionally funniest lines (“These damn lice can’t even let a man die without making him itch.”)

Battles scenes are suitably brutal, as befitting one of the most bloody conflicts in modern military history, but are shot in such purely cinematic terms they barely suggest the real-world horrors soldiers from either side would have faced. Slow-motion hand-to-hand combat, complete with CGI blood-splatter (ala, 300) and ‘bullet-cam’ (ala, The Matrix) are used and re-used; one sequence, in which the Russian’s bounce a shell off a tank hull with pinpoint accuracy, is just plain stupid.

The director lathers his brave infantrymen in a warm, nationalistic glow, which is admirable but also detrimental; so one-dimensionally heroic are his band of brothers, audience connect as they would with a ‘James Bond’ or ‘Indiana Jones’ type. One should walk away exhausted and deeply moved by the courage these men displayed in the face of a tyrannical force. Instead, Fedor Bondarchuk's bloody battle epic celebrates the excesses of war cinema far more effectively than it does the heroism of his countrymen.