24/100Philistine alert! Like watching a three-hour version of Holy Grail's "Bring Out Your Dead" sketch with the jokes removed—German's sole interest in the novel appears to be the opportunity it affords him to have an ostensibly enlightened man trudge through endless muck, encountering nonstop cruelty and ignorance. The issue for me isn't so much that nothing "happens" as that nothing progresses; even in, say, the third chapter of Sátántangó (to pick a film in roughly the same aesthetic and temperamental ballpark), which is just an hour of a fat old man drinking and spying on his neighbors, there's distinct forward motion, inspiring curiosity about what will follow. German, on the other hand, just keeps constructing formally complex Steadicam shots that navigate impressively cluttered and decrepit sets populated by grotesques, and while any given few minutes is visually striking, every few minutes is the same few minutes. Without Don Rumata's internal monologue, there's nothing to distinguish one episode from another until the very end, giving the entire film a random quality. Meanwhile, the story's Prime Directive aspect is barely even discernible—I submit that if you showed this film to someone who doesn't speak Russian, and turned off the subtitles during the opening expository voiceover, said viewer would never in a million years be able to figure out that Don Rumata possesses advanced knowledge that the rest of the population lacks, much less that he's from another planet about 800 years further along technologically. Instead, he just comes across as more brutal than everybody else, which doesn't make a whole lot of allegorical sense—it's not as if superpowers are invading third-world nations with superior steel and better understanding of how to wield a machete. The entire point of the source material appears to have been discarded in favor of an epic exercise in production design. It's as if German were the dude in Marwencol, and after spending years creating a life-size imaginary medieval world, he just wants to spend three hours giving us a guided tour, pointing out all the detail he poured into it.[Comments now closed as fans of this film insist on being rude.]
If you're ready for 3 hours of floundering in filth, staggerstumbling through the muck and mire shitscape that is Akanar, swathed in an incomprehensible steamfog, perpetually rolling through the frame, enveloping everyone and everything...Medieval times as alien...future as past...cyclical oppression and barbarinism shot through documentarian-observer style with reportage style camerawork showcasing cultural and academic destitution where the townfolk administer ladlefulls of a lacquerlike substance over an endless array of noosehung bodies transforming the swaying corpses into public ornaments sparkling in the sunlit human decay like a public display of the knick-knack trinkets culled from endless days of slaughtering artists and academias then German's Hard to Be a God is your ticket to cinematic paradise.This is cinematic world-building at its finest; never has the bar been raised so unattainably high. It's sci-fi as past, present and future all at once set within the brutality of the 13th century, all captured immaculately by cinematographers Vladimir Ilin and Yuri Klimenko who employ reportage-style camerawork littered with elaborate long takes with lyrical movements, occasionally stopping for moments of static reflection; add to the masterwork cinematography, superlative costume and production design and Hard to Be a God presents itself as one of the greatest films in the history of cinema. This is top-tier film-making.Hard to Be a God turned out to be Alesei Yuryevich German's sixth and final film, marking the end of an unprolific career wherein German directed six films in 45 years with this film in particular taking around 12 years (6 years of filming) to finish, which was undertaken by German's wife and co-writer Svetlana Karmalitaand his son Aleksei German Jr. A film adaptation of the sci-fi novel by the same name written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, probably best known for writing the novel Roadside Picnic as well as the screenplay for Tarkovsky's Stalker.The film involves a group of scientists from the future Earth on a mission on the alien planet of Arkanar which is currently in the Medieval phase, seemingly missing the boat on that whole Renaissance part; well not really missing out on it, but more so strangling and murdering it into the ground by snuffing out anyand all scholarly endeavors. HARD TO BE A GOD centers on one of these Earthling scientists, by the name of Don Rumata, tasked with observing the daily occurrences of the planet which mostly consist of brutality without the ability to interfere violently...essentially taking God's place.Don Rumata spends his time trying to save the local intellectuals from the gallows and shitpits as well as meeting with the other Earth-born scientists, but his main goal is to find a doctor by the name of Budakh and protect him, however, Rumata slowly becomes distraught over the unceasing suffering of the citizens and their miserable state of life resulting in a bloodbath started errant arrow and a bull horn helmet stabbing, ending with dead bodies strewn throughout the village, entrails almost everywhere one looks, marinating in the mud, piss and shit.
narrator: our story begins, me: looks like england. maybe sheffield narrator: on a distant planet, as far advanced as the middle ages on Earth, me: oh God
