Meteor trembling – Newspaper Kommersant No. 236 (7437) of 12/20/2022

Dmitry Kiselev’s disaster film “Mir” about saving Vladivostok from the devastating effects of a meteor shower is being released. Julia Shagelman I was convinced that domestic filmmakers have fully mastered the Hollywood language, but they speak it exclusively in Russian.

According to official figures, Mira’s budget amounted to 540 million rubles, and the authors are trying very hard to make every penny spent not in vain visible on the screen. The picture opens with spectacular shots: a huge meteorite approaches the Earth from space, lights up, entering the dense layers of the atmosphere, is about to collapse, destroying a couple of continents … But, having reached our planet, it turns out to be just a tiny pebble that hits the windshield car, leaves a small crack on it. This car is driven by 15-year-old Lena Arabova (Veronika Ustimova), her mother (Daria Moroz), stepfather (Maxim Lagashkin) and his son from a previous marriage, a second-grader Yegor (Alexander Petrov). The case takes place in Vladivostok, and the choice of the city can immediately be written down in the pros of “Worlds” – the cinematic destruction of New York, London and even Moscow will not surprise anyone for a long time.

While Lera is in a hurry for sports competitions, her own father (Anatoly Bely) is hovering above the Earth: he is a flight mechanic of the space orbital station, where he has been for six years and where his best friend and almost the only interlocutor has become an artificial intelligence system, which he calls “Mira “. His relationship with his daughter and ex-wife is, to put it mildly, not the warmest. The impetus for the breakup of the family was an accident, as a result of which Lera is afraid of fire and hides traces of burns from idle glances: everyone blames the girl’s father for that old fire. But even from space, he does not deprive her of his attention, because Mira can connect to any electronic devices on Earth, and although this equipment is top-secret, Arabov shamelessly uses it to monitor his daughter using street cameras and mobile phones.

The host of the Vladivostok radio station, whose voice is carried over the city, warns that soon the inhabitants will witness a unique phenomenon – the flight of an asteroid. You should not be afraid of this: nothing threatens the Earth, the celestial body will pass by. Of course, according to the law of the genre, this is exactly what will not happen, otherwise what will the two hours of the film be about? Arabov’s colleagues at the orbital station also guess, but they are not able to prevent a catastrophe, and not even one asteroid, but a whole meteor shower, falls on Vladivostok, and these episodes are filmed no worse than some Roland Emmerich (and, like him, are full of typical blockbuster violations of logic and common sense). Lera’s family is scattered in different places, and now she needs to find everyone, and at the same time, of course, save the city from even greater destruction, believe in herself and make peace with her dad, who takes an active part in everything that happens right from orbit.

In the filmography of director Kiselev, the largest place is occupied by numerous releases of the New Year’s franchise “Yolka”, but he is not new to the space theme either – in 2017, his film “First Time” was released about the flight of Pavel Belyaev and Alexei Leonov on Voskhod-2. Despite the patriotic bias, that picture was clearly focused on Hollywood examples of the genre, so as a big popcorn spectacle it worked flawlessly. The same can be said about The World – Vladivostok is beautiful and glossy here, the special effects are rendered with high quality, and the script is written according to all the testaments of Blake Snyder’s legendary Save the Cat! When viewing, not only Emmerich is remembered; in places “The World” almost reaches the emotional heights of “Armageddon” by Michael Bay, no one in this genre has been surpassed since 1998. The authors even send a separate hello to the generation that remembers his first screenings in cinemas, voicing the most touching moments with the song “There” by Micah and Jumanji, released just a year later.

However, behind all these professional achievements lies a sinister idea. After all, the miraculous salvation of Lera and the entire city becomes possible only because a certain secret supercomputer has access to the personal information of citizens and the ability to monitor them 24/7. So, in two clicks, Arabov finds out everything he needs to know about Lera’s friend Misha (Evgeny Egorov), and in another click he connects to his high-tech prosthetic hand and starts to control it. Therefore, despite the ideas of inclusion of the disabled and touching scenes of family unity, unexpectedly advanced for Russian cinema, in the course of the action of the “Mir” it begins to look more and more like a frightening dystopia in the spirit of the Black Mirror series, for some reason passed off as an optimistic movie about saving humanity . However, just like the presenter at the beginning of the film, the authors reassure: no need to worry, of course, Big Brother is watching us even through a baby monitor, but this is for our own good.