Saturday Solutions - Вий

There is seemingly no hurry to provide the solution to yesterday's question, so let's go back several days to Monday's mystery movie. Because i'm going to spoil an aspect of the movie to talk about why i like it, part of this post will be continued on a separate page for easy avoidance.

Here's a scaled down compilation of the 10 screen shots presented in the previous post:

This movie is the 5th film version of Nikolai Gogol's book (the 4th Russian/Soviet film, there's also a Korean movie adaptation) The book was first published back in 1835, and the first film version was a 1909 silent adaptation, now lost. The book has also influenced other movies (such as Mario Bava's Black Sunday), music, and even video games.
So, what is it called?

Viy (2014) is more often found as Forbidden Empire internationally.

Parts of the book, including the titular demon, Viy, are taken from Gogol's tale, with a new narrative intersecting the old tale. To bring us outsiders into the fantasy world of the novel, we travel with Johnathan Green, a mapmaker with a dream - to establish his hometown of Greenwich as the baseline by which the world is measured. Even our 'normal' person isn't quite from our world, however.
Note that he drives his carriage from the inside, via his own semi-steampunk technology...

...he has a distance mapping wheel of his own design mounted behind the carriage...

...and his own special tech developed for his mapping work -

The patently ridiculous notion of Johnathan Green's goal of mapping the globe to establish the Greenwich Meridian via a carriage with a distance tracking wheel is likely a product of the transliteration process, adapting the story to the western audience while translating to English. It makes much more sense when you realize that our protagonist is based on Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, a French cartographer who first mapped and recorded the culture of the Ukrainian territories. The whole notion works a lot better when no oceans are involved.

I enjoyed the movie's visuals and rich atmospherics quite a bit. The story was both simple to follow and tangled enough to be interesting. Apparently, enough people agreed with me to put a sequel into production.
But, to talk about what i liked best will spoil part of the plot, at least on a general basis. So, if you don't want that to happen, don't follow the link to the rest of this post. Just go find the movie and enjoy. You can always come back here later, eh?

Защитники

Let's take a break from Supersnipe, a break from the past, almost a break from comics, even.
You may (or may not) recall these folks from the Video Whozit on Friday Fun & Games a few weeks back:

Let's go there.

While not actually based on  a comic book, they are very much a comic book team. At first glance, they might seem to be a take on Marvel Comics' old Soviet Super-Soldiers.
Okay, maybe not first glance at that pic. But that's because the guy in back is in his civvies. Normally in the field, one might expect him to look more like this:

He might even be sporting a massive machine gun, but that doesn't jibe with the SSS.

Once you get closer, they're very obviously their own team, the surface resemblance mostly due to the rather obvious Russian Bear that almost any superhero team might be likely to develop.
This team is the

Guardians (Zashchitniki (Защитники)) is a 2017 movie from Russia. And despite that, and anything said above, it is very much a 'Marvel' movie, in its way. And not unintentionally. In many ways it's strictly a by-the-numbers superhero film, following a specific structure and pattern.
But it does the job well, hits all the numbers on their marks, treats the material seriously, and doesn't cheap out on the effects. It does the job it's supposed to do, and doesn't get buried with world building (though it certainly lays plenty of seeds for future growth) or extraneous unrelated plot clutter (while still trying to develop the main characters a bit past cardboard cut-outs).

One of the reasons i enjoy foreign movies (fine.films. happy?) as much as i do is for the disruption of expectations. Little things might different, simply because it comes from a different culture with a somewhat unfamiliar day-to-day existence. Other things may be massively different, like what drew me to Hong Kong action films. Look at Chow Yun Fat's work in the early 90s. The star of the film made it out of about half of his movies alive. Can you imagine watching a Hollywood movie and not knowing if the star is going to survive the story? Hell, you can crash from orbit and walk out smoking a cigar in Hollywood.

Here, we're dealing with the former situation - a very familiar story structure that seems a bit fresher simply because of the slightly different view of things. Quite familiar, in a lot of ways.
As stated above, it's very much a 'Marvel' movie. but instead of S.H.I.E.L.D., we have PATRIOT-

Staffing the PATRIOT base, we have very familiar looking tech agents-

...and a somewhat less familiar looking 'Nick Fury', Major Elena Larina...

The story opens with a military hardware test, showcasing the capabilities of new combat droids - and the level of effects we can expect in the movie. Both are rather cool. I especially like the rapid movement mode, which i won't try to capture in still images. But the detail level of the geometry and mapping is highlighted in the droids...

...and the basic effects levels scale up as the droids go into live combat mode and assault the military testing team...

...the destruction complete, the sequence also serves to reveal our Big Bad, and his machine control capability...

Our threat to the world here is a former Soviet scientist, August Kuratov, who ran what was basically a metahuman creation test laboratory back before the collapse. As one might suspect from the image above, he continued his work on himself...

To deal with the newly emergent threat, PATRIOT has a plan to find and bring together some of his old 'experiments' to stop him.
Our team consists of four heroes. There's Ursus, the Bear, of course, as seen above...

The CGI is well done, with good procedurals for the hair and some subtle work in animating the musculature beneath. (As a former modeller/animator, i may tend to look too hard at that stuff sometimes) The change from human to werebear form is smoothly done, and not at all the Rick-Baker-Painful type transformation...

On the recruiting hunt, our heroes to be have all been living reclusive lives, save one - Xenia - who's found a way to capitalize on her ability to become invisible when wet...

Now, don't being saying mean things because i said "invisible when wet". It gets better than that. You wouldn't want to hurt Xenia's feelings now, would you?

I didn't think so. Let's move on to Ler, our Geokinetic - able to control earth & stone, who had been living as a monk (hence the outfit)

...and Khan, a blade wielding speedster...

One side effect of the 'failed' experiments that produced our team members is greatly extended longevity. It's been four decades since the program was shut down, and they've barely aged. That could make things awkward on the franchise front in the long term, but it serves the story well in the here and now.

The story plays out as expected in general structure, with all the good flavour in the seasonings and handling. There's some great locations...

(Yeah, those are people up on the lines)

...and they can take advantage of old, ravaged locations to build authentic desolate atmosphere...

Much further and we'll have to start getting into story and actual spoilers. So we'll stop here.

Guardians was a box office bomb, attendance dropping off a cliff after a moderately strong opening. It was panned for being derivative, which it is, as i've noted. But that seems very intentional, and it works. Some derided the CGI as being cheap, but it works effectively and doesn't distract - at least on the small screen. Sometimes what looks good there looks terrible projected on a theatre screen.
It did so bad in the theatres in Russia that the production company filed for bankruptcy and a major investor has sued for 'Gimme My Money Back'.
On the other hand, a sequel has already been announced, this time by a Chinese production company. So, we'll see how it pans out.

For my quick summary:

Guardians is a solid and enjoyable (non)Marvel movie with its own distinctive, though very derivative, vibe. It even includes a mid-credits scene, as might be expected. (though i must admit i hung around hoping for a post credits scene with a flying Volga. Ah, well.) There's no big surprises, just a basic fun superhero flic.
I've watched it twice, and i'll watch it again. I can think of some major American superhero movies i can't say that about.
I recommend genre fans give it a view.

all images from Защитники (2017)