Salyut-7 (2017)

Here is a film that knows exactly what it is: a Russian disaster picture about two men in a frozen tin can, and it has no interest in apologizing for that. Klim Shipenko's Salyut-7 reconstructs the 1985 Soyuz T-13 mission, in which cosmonauts docked with a dead space station and coaxed it back to life through cold, darkness, and improvisation. The hardware is convincing. The zero-gravity work is patient and physical. The film wants us to admire competence, and for long stretches it earns that admiration honestly.

Where it drifts from the record, it drifts toward spectacle. A fire that never happened, a timeline compressed from three months into a handful of days, and, most audaciously, a NASA shuttle mission dispatched to steal the station out from under the Soviets. The Challenger rendezvous is invention, and it flatters the audience's sense of who the heroes were. This is patriotic embroidery, not historical revision in the contemporary sense. The film has no interest in re-litigating the past through modern social categories. Its cast is Russian because the mission was Russian. A female cosmonaut appears briefly and is allowed to simply exist. There is no sermon about representation, no climate anxiety, no economic critique dressed as adventure, no therapeutic vocabulary about bodies or minds. The Cold War here is a rivalry between nations, not classes.

What remains is a sturdy genre exercise with a nationalistic pulse. It salutes Soviet ingenuity, occasionally too loudly, and asks the viewer to salute back. That is a form of lecturing, though it predates the current fashion for it by several decades. We can classify it accordingly, with the mild fatigue such classification always produces.