The promised loop – Newspaper Kommersant No. 194 (7395) dated 10/19/2022

Francois Decrac’s film Le visiteur du future, based on the popular web series (2009-2014), is released. The film claims to be a dystopian comedy, but turned out to be Mikhail Trofimenkov, not scary enough and not funny enough.

Obviously, many potential viewers will have an unconditioned reflex. What, the French comedy “Alien from the Future”? “Must take”: certainly something like the delightfully vulgar “Aliens” (1993) by Jean-Marc Poiret. Alas, Decrac’s film is from a completely different universe than the adventures of Count Godefroy de Montmirail and the foolish servant Jacques abandoned by a feeble-minded sorcerer in modern times from the 12th century.

The point is not at all that the “Aliens” paid back the budget tenfold, and the “Alien”, which gathered three hundred and a thousand spectators, is not in danger of triumph. Dekraka’s film is a discounted version of Enki Bilal’s genius comics The Palace Hotel Bunker (1989) and The Immortals. War of the Worlds (2004). But if in Bilal one feels the powerful tread of the ancient tragedy of fate overtaking humanity, then Dekrak, under all the supposed apocalyptic circumstances, winks at the audience: all my nightmares are not serious, giggles and hahanki.

The experience of world fiction proves that there is no plot more complicated than a time paradox. Two geniuses coped with his snag. Ray Bradbury in the story “And Thunder Came” about a butterfly trampled in the prehistoric past, whose death irreversibly changes the entire course of world history. And Chris Marker in The Runway (1963), where a boy sees a man die on the Orly runway, unaware that he is the man who endured the tragic journey to the future and back.

Decrak, of course, is guided by the “Runway”. His Paris is also in ruins after a nuclear catastrophe. And in the bunkers of the future, both glamorous-totalitarian and homeless-hipster, round-the-clock experiments on “zero-transportation” are going on. Only here with the notorious time loop, Decrak, as expected, did not cope. No matter how many butterflies you trample on, the future for some reason, by and large, does not change.

In short, the calendar shows the year 2555. A radioactive cloud sweeps over the planet, destroying half of humanity every seventy years. From day to day, for some reason, all survivors must die. When asked whether the zombies that filled the streets of ruined Paris will die, Decrack does not answer. The viewer only learns that zombies are divided into walking and running. They differ in that some walk, while others run. This is a scripted joke, if anyone does not understand.

The unprincipled politician of our time, Gilbert Albert (Arnaud Ducret), who signed a contract with a Chinese company for the construction of an explosive nuclear power plant, is to blame for the death of mankind. More precisely, not so much him as two idiot engineers who, when an emergency happened at the nuclear power plant, pressed the wrong button. Well, if you dig deeper, then the aliens from the future who confused them are even more to blame. First – a valiant, as it turns out later, Stranger (Floran Doren), rushing back and forth between eras and continents. And then – robocops from the Time Patrol, which makes sure that no one makes any amendments to the scenario of a global catastrophe. Their philosophy is reduced to the legendary gangster maxim: if the aunt was killed, then it was time for her to die. “Auntie” in this case is our unfortunate old Earth.

The Time Patrol trio is enough to exhaustively describe the entire purely comic book aesthetic of The Alien. Louise is a female martial artist. Matteo is a one-eyed colossus. Victor is an idiot who, at the most inopportune moments, offers to “crack the bottle”. Strictly speaking, all the characters in the film are divided into three categories: women, giants and idiots. True, there is also a crowd of some completely useless for the plot homeless children, patronized by the African warrior Beletta: well, just some kind, God forgive me, the “Republic of SHKID”.

Only Albert and his daughter Alice (Enya Baru), an environmental activist who considers the pope, on the one hand, a class enemy, and on the other hand, tremblingly sympathizes with him, fall out of the typical series. The poor oligarch becomes an inveterate drunkard, not resigned to the death of his wife during the birth of Alice. Both father and daughter find themselves in the same nightmarish future for which they are responsible.

Their peculiarity is that, unlike other defendants, they are the bearers of a certain ideology. Albert is an adherent of the neo-liberal economy, and, what is certainly an aggravating circumstance, a partner of Chinese businessmen. Well, is it possible to expect something good from the Chinese? Alice, on the other hand, is one of those girls who the other day, for an unknown purpose, doused Van Gogh’s Sunflowers tomato soup in the London National Gallery. A fan of renewable energy. Only the fact that her ideas will ultimately win out will not make the future any less disgusting than in the Decrack film. In general, a very relevant movie in the light of the current global energy problems.