With any luck, we in the U.S. will see how big the overlap is between disaster movie fans and the subtitle-fond crowd. Currently making the circuit of international film festivals is Prityazhenie (Attraction), a rare Russian entry into the genre. It tells the story of a damaged alien spacecraft being shot down by Russian fighter jets, causing it to crash in Moscow and kill hundreds.
The title is a play on words: it speaks to both the attraction of the ship by the planet’s gravity as well as the attraction between one of the surviving aliens and a teenaged girl who’s rebelling against her colonel father (of course).
Directing the movie was veteran Fedor Bondarchuk, winner of multiple awards over the years for both directing and acting. Before Attraction, his most recent feature was Stalingrad, which won four of the six Golden Eagle awards for which it was nominated. (The Golden Eagles are Russia’s equivalent to the Oscars in the U.S.) The film reteams Bondarchuk with his Stalingrad stars Mariya Smolnikova (Dancing with the Stars), Yanina Studilina (The Russian Room), Pyotr Fyodorov (The Duelist), and Thomas Kretschmann (Blade II, Resident Evil: Apocalypse).
The film has already done well in its Russian release, grossing close to $18 million since January on a budget of not quite $6 million. And since April, it has appeared at film festivals in Brussels, Edinburgh, Neuchatel, and Japan, yielding a Golden Raven nomination at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film. It opens in Germany today, but no U.S. release has been announced yet. Stay tuned…
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