Title: The Guardians
Director: Sarik Andreasyan
Starring: Valeriya Shkirando as Elena Latina
Sanzhar Madiyev as Khan
Anton Pampushnyy as Arsus
Alina Lanina as Kseniya
Sebastien Sisak as Ler
Length: 1 hour 28 minutes
Rated: 12
The Guardians is releasedAugust 28th on Blu-ray and DVD.
The Guardians is a Russian made action, sci-fi adventure. During WWII, Joseph Stalin receives intelligence reports on top secret genetic experiments performed by Nazi doctors who were trying to create a super soldier. It was reported that German doctors carried out their experiments in the territories Germany occupied during the war - France, Spain, Poland and… USSR. Meanwhile, United States intelligence reported that there are traces of super humans in the States. Stalin has no choice but to create “Patriot” - a super-secret defiance and research organisationto combat the potential threat from the German experiments.
The Soviet experiments continued after Stalin’s death and During the Cold War, "Patriot" succeeded in altering the DNA of selected individuals, and created a team with super human powers known as GUARDIANS, to defend the homeland from any threats.Now, for the first time, the superheroes gather to prevent a nuclear disaster that could destroy the entire world.
Superhero films are popular, so why shouldn’t Russian movie makers want to put their own spin on the genre? Unfortunately they haven’t, they’ve just copied what they thought was what people liked and failed to add anything new or different. It’s extremely derivative of other genre films. And that is its main downfall.
The dialogue is awful and/or unintentionally funny, but generally poor, but it might be badly translated as I watched the dubbed version? The costumes and sets are pretty good and it’s reasonably directed.
Sadly most of the super abilities are a bit lame - ability to control your own body temperature - naff, shapeshifting into a bear - a bit too Hobbitty for me, and the ability to control rocks and use these rocks as amour - sort of a Magneto / The Thing from Fantastic 4 combo? Just weird.
But with a comparatively small budget of about $5M it’s still a film, it still stands up as 90 minutes of entertainment. Worth a watch just to see what Russian film makers are capable of doing, even with a limited budget, and to be fair it’s a lot funnier than the super serious super hero movies that the big studios churn out.
