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| Images courtesy of Central Partnership |
A former intern of director Nancy Meyers on the set of her
film Something’s Gotta Give, film worker Klim Shipenko initially
studied at the California State University at Northridge before gradually working
his way back to Russia where he directed programs for Channel One including but
not limited to shows about cars. Having
his fair share of romantic comedies and dramas, the filmmaker’s first real
brush with science-fiction came with the 2017 3D true disaster film Salyut 7
depicting the 1985 Soyuz T-13 mission in which a dead space station is lost
in orbit before being docked with and resuscitated. A technically proficient critical and
commercial favorite, the film in hindsight is something of a dress rehearsal
for what is being touted as the very first fictional feature film to be shot in
outer space with the 2023 medical space thriller The Challenge.
In the Earth’s orbiting International Space Station, a
Russian cosmonaut Oleg Bogdanov (Oleg Novitsky) is conducting a spacewalk when
debris from an orbiting emergency satellite strikes him, breaking several ribs
and damaging his right lung with inflammation.
Urgently needing medical attention but unable to risk possible further
injury let alone death upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, mission
control and doctors embark on an endeavor that’s never been attempted before:
thoracic surgery in outer space replete with zero gravity. With no trained cosmonauts skilled in the medical
field, the rescue mission drafts several young applicants all skilled in
surgery but unaccustomed to the physical endurances of space travel before
falling on a young single mother named Evgenia Belyaeva (Yulia Pereslid) as the
primary candidate.
Running nearly three hours with the first eighty or so
devoted entirely to formulating the rescue mission, The Challenge gets
off to a sluggish if not perfunctory start with our central heroine flashing
back throughout to black-and-white memories of an Enter the Void styled
car crash which claimed the life of her husband. A beleaguered young medical professional too
busy to raise her misfit daughter or tend to her ailing mother’s medical needs,
The Challenge is bogged down by these boilerplate cliches that feel
lifted from Gravity or Interstellar more than anything. Still, once the film finally does get into
space, yes, there is a kind of magic and spectacle unfolding before our very
eyes before shifting gears into a surprisingly graphic medical thriller replete
with laparoscopic surgery and a makeshift surgical tool made from a metallic spoon. Not quite the in-your-face medical thriller
one was expecting to see in the International Space Station.
With the space sequences comprising the last half of the
film shot in twelve days, The Challenge was being constructed in a race
to beat a then-unproduced Tom Cruise and Doug Liman planned space movie to the
finish line. While touted as the first fictional
feature film shot in space, years earlier the 1984 Soviet film Return from
Orbit did in fact feature scenes filmed onboard the Salyut 7 space station
but such is the way of marketing and this has the most footage shot in space by
a professional film director. Shot by
Boris Litovchenko and for the space sequences the director himself, The
Challenge looks chilly and slick if not flat until it jumps into zero
gravity handheld for the orbital scenes.
The score by Nikolay Rostov and Sergey Cheremisinov on the other hand is
bland starter pack Hans Zimmer save for some moments of playful electronica in
zero gravity. Nothing to get excited
about. The film’s ensemble cast including
but not limited to Vladimir Mashkov from Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
as the flight director of mission control, The White Lotus actor Miloš
Biković as one of the doctor candidates for the mission are mostly fine though
much of the attention is focused on Yulia Pereslid as our heroic surgeon.
Still, even amid captivating scenes of zero gravity surgery
and the multitude of efforts to administer anesthesia and coordinate the
operation with fellow cosmonauts on board ill equipped to deal with such a
task, the film slips into cringeworthy running gags like Evgenia’s mother being
deceived into thinking her daughter is still at home and a phone call about
groceries is literally broadcast onto the space station as she’s cutting the
guy open and she has to think her way through this verbal blather. Its an absurdity so ridiculous it feels like
a bomb going off underneath your seat. With
a premise and exercise as unique as this, why did it need to usher in the goofy
cops awkwardly timed ‘humor’ from The Last House on the Left? When it doesn’t slip on banana peels like
that, I’m sorry to say much of The Challenge is disengaging if not
torpid with flat characters and increasingly silly contrivances. Despite beautiful orbital vistas, the bloated space surgery film never really gets off the ground.
Opening in Russian cinemas alongside John Wick: Chapter 4
(yes, American films apparently are still being released there despite the war
and sanctions), The Challenge while opening to middling if not mixed reception
over the aforementioned melodramatics that make the more sentimental outbursts
of Interstellar seem mild by comparison nevertheless became a box office
leader in the country. Presented in a
newly developed alternative to IMAX called CosMAX, the film while breaking new
ground in terms of shooting in zero gravity let alone outer space nevertheless
in retrospect is kind of chilly. For as
much time this film overspends on establishing its characters, you never get
close to anyone and while the surgical scenes are tense and fresh on the silver
screen, at the end of the day its hard to invest in this otherwise empty
spectacle. Russia did the bona fide
outer space movie first but as a fan of Russian movies old and new, so what?
--Andrew Kotwicki
