The sequel to “Midshipmen” showed: 236 years later, Russia has the same enemies

When Dmitry Kharatyan starred in the television film “Midshipmen, Forward!”, he was 27. Of the three main characters, only Dmitry Vadimovich participated in “Midshipmen III” in 1991, so that the viewers of subsequent sequels did not hurt the eyes of his “loneliness.” In 2023, the People’s Artist “turned” 63, so when the legendary Svetlana Druzhinina put on the poster the cherished word “Midshipmen” and a joint photo with Mikhail Mamaev, Alexander Domogarov, Kharatyan and only one “newcomer” artist (plus the 70-year-old who played Suvorov sculptor Vladimir Surovtsev), we still understood why the “old guard” needed to appear on the screen. MK correspondent talks about the new film, seen on the wide screen.

Journalists almost drove Kharatyan

Dmitry Kharatyan, at his far from young age, handles a sword very well. He’s beautiful on camera – that’s a fact. By comparison, Bruce Willis, in some of the last films of his illustrious career, played a man who essentially stood in one place and spoke through a headset to characters who did all the work for him. But the Russian midshipman is also a “retired” midshipman.

The final song in the credits is touching: “The sail and the soul are one, / Fate and the Motherland are one,” this time sung in one voice. It seems that the melody was deliberately made a little slower than three decades ago. But recognition does not suffer from this, and the audience’s love for Kharatyan does not decrease: at the Mosfilm cinema, where the second part of the Midshipmen 1787 duology was shown on November 10, he was greeted as a star of the first magnitude.

“People’s Artist of Russia Dmitry Kharatyan,” they announced loudly, and the crowd shook, rushing towards the man ascending the stairs. It immediately became clear who the “nail” was that held everything together. Journalists did not give Kharatyan peace. A few minutes before the start of the show, the actor simply stepped aside, clutched flowers under his arm and drank water from a bottle, like an athlete after a cross-country race. He was clearly “driven” that evening.

Svetlana Druzhinina, inviting the actors on stage, called everyone her friend – “my friends” was heard more often than any other words. The director forced the audience of the huge hall to applaud everyone who worked on her film, including the camera crew, costume designers and technical workers. But the ovation was deserved and sincere.

Young people love us everywhere

Alexander Domogarov is not far behind Kharatyan, who is still capable of giving a couple of fencing lessons to young people. He seems to be in his seventh decade, but dashingly rides a horse and, according to Druzhinina, without a saddle, impressively and professionally.

Mikhail Mamaev also did not change his status as a superhero of Catherine’s time, Olga Mashnaya is no longer just a lover, but a wife and mother – she has naturally evolved since the latest events. Boyarsky is an undisputed master, his appearance in the film is short-lived, but the audience understands: yes, this is the same de Brillie (albeit “resurrected”), and his presence in the sequel does not need to be justified by fiction, as was the case with the elderly Schwarzenegger in Dark Fate “

However, the “old guard”, as in many sequels, is called upon to do one thing – hand over the reins to new heroes. There is a huge difference between “retiring” and “fading into the background”, but inevitably you will have to focus completely on what is happening to the children of the midshipmen. And it’s up to the viewer to accept them and, with the same enthusiasm as in 1987, follow their adventures and love affairs or not.

In both parts – designated by the words “Peace” and “War” in the second part of the title – events revolve around the children of the heroes of the first “Midshipmen”. This is the son of Alyosha Korsak and Sophia Alexander (Andrei Laptev, actor born in 1998, graduate of “Sliver”) and his beloved Alexandra Yaguzhinskaya, as you can guess from her last name – the daughter of Alexander Belov. Her role was played by debutante Nika Zdorik, and Andrei Laptev coped with his task a little better; Nika is too pretentious and overacts in places, but apparently this is how she sees the image of the fatal beauty.

The historical background of love is the Russian-Turkish war. And yes – if the goal of the film, supported, among other things, by the Russian Military Historical Society and the Ministry of Defense, is to show how the Russians beat the Turks who violated the Kuchuk-Kainardzhi Peace Treaty and encroached on Crimea – it would have been impossible to do this without a sexy couple.

Even in the USSR God was with the Russians

And here a reasonable question arises: is there too much patriotism in the film “Midshipmen: 1787. War”. Yes, there is more than enough of it. But also in “Midshipmen, forward!” European powers want to drive Russia back into the forests and swamps, they dream that it will turn away from the path paved by Peter I. “Russia must become a maritime power,” says Alyoshka pathetically, and at the height of perestroika this did not bother anyone. Everyone dreamed of freeing themselves from Soviet reality and returning to the national origins of the Russian state. “It’s time to take back this land,” the current rock musician-foreign agent sang then.

And it is not surprising that in the sequel, created in 2023, the emphasis is on Crimea, on the Turks, whom the French specialist helps to build fortifications on the sandy shore (filming of these scenes was carried out on the territory of the peninsula) and generally instructs how to beat “Russian pigs.” Naturally, without success: ours made their way into the enemy’s camp, stung in the very heart and won (it’s impossible to tell more about this without spoilers).

“Crimea is ours” from the 18th century is perceived normally, but in half a century it will look like a film classic. A smile was caused by the repeated mention of the Mariupol people: “How do the Mariupol people fight there? Well done Mariupol people!” This was done to show the connection with the realities of the new territories of the Russian Federation – they say, people from today’s Donbass, Bakhmut and Lugansk Cossacks served Russia, so they were not abandoned in 2014 or 2022. But it seemed to me that this is still a little-known page of history, and it will be difficult for the viewer, especially a young one, to make Mariupol residents in the mass consciousness the same tough guys as the Don Cossacks, the Soviet Chapaevites/Budennovites, and so on. But maybe we are standing at the origins of a new historical “brand”.

It is also worth mentioning that the new “Midshipmen” are replete with scenes where characters pray or turn to God for help. In the First World War, according to the testimony of the officers of that time, the soldiers were very religious, what can we say about the contemporaries of Catherine the Great. But still the repetition frequency seems excessive. There are films that are entirely Christ-centric, like Pavel Lungin’s Orthodox masterpiece “The Island,” where prayer sounds constantly, which is required by the monastery walls and the hermitage of the character Mamonov. The commanders and sailors in the film “Admiral” pray when they find themselves in a hopeless situation—and God clearly shows that he is with the Russians. But there the religious component acts as a seed from which the tree of Faith grows in the viewer’s soul, but the tree itself is not filmed in close-up, metaphorically speaking.

Finally, in some places the film seemed too bloody. Yes, it contains the wish that “knives cut only bread,” but these same knives pierce the bodies of Russians and enemies (with blood gushing) again often. A fictitious baby is killed by a shrapnel in a doll’s head, and this is demonstrated in close-up. The cannonball blows off the horse’s head – it’s all blood and gore, with an age limit of 12+.

In the credits we will read that not a single animal was harmed – but this is little consolation. In the song of “The Musketeers” there was “the metal of bloodshed, bloodshed flying into the chest,” but there for the audience there was “anesthesia” in the form of daring and humor, but here everything is straightforward and literal.