The Blackout (2019)

The Blackout, released in Russia under the title Avanpost, arrives as a grim and overlong account of an alien cordon around Moscow. Most of the planet goes dark, a small ring survives, and psychic soldiers spend two hours jostling with a brooding alien named Eid over the fate of the species. The plot concerns a perimeter, a quarantine zone, and reconnaissance teams that fail to return. It is a thriller that runs like a military procedural and ends like a shrug. The film grossed a modest sum and earned mixed notices, which feels about right.

A cultural audit of this picture yields a largely empty ledger. The cast is drawn wholly from the Russian industry, with no nod toward representation. There are no queer characters, no engagement with race, no climate lament, and no gripe against the wealthy. The catastrophe here is extraterrestrial, so nobody is made to feel guilty about an SUV. Women do carry rifles and command squads, and a few of them die bravely, but the film never pauses to argue a thesis about gender. The screenwriters simply needed bodies for the perimeter, and they found some.

The director has said his film leans anti-war, a modest ambition that surfaces mainly in the final minutes, when the surviving humans breach an alien vessel and decline to smash the pods holding the invaders' children. That is a small mercy in a loud movie. Otherwise we get bears, gunfire, entrails, and computer graphics in generous supply, and the sermons are nowhere to be found. The moral is faint. The spectacle is loud. The balance tips toward spectacle every time.