Subject: REVIEW: HARD TO BE A GOD

From: [email-masked] (Mark James)
Date: 26 Aug 91 14:56:03 GMT

[Followups directed to rec.arts.movies.]

				HARD TO BE A GOD
			A film review by T. Mark James
			A review in the public domain

     I walked into HARD TO BE A GOD a minute late, and immediately began
to wonder if I had not entered the wrong room.  Instead of the "film
adaptation of a science-fiction classic by the Strugatzki brothers,"
what I saw on the screen looked more like CONAN THE BARBARIAN.  "I am
Romalla of Arkachon," cries our blue-eyed, goldilocked hero as he leaps
from his horse and draws two swords.  "Approach me and die!"  And the
brigands dutifully slink off into the dust.  I began to wish that I
*had* entered the wrong room.

     Actually, though, I ended up loving this film.  If "Romalla of
Arkachon" (I forget the name he used) acted like a puerile fantasy of
mediaeval chivalry, it's because he was from another planet and felt
distinctly uneasy about pretending to be a local.

     The premise of the story is that an advanced human civilization,
which has succeeded in ending war, misery and passion, discovers a
remote world of uncivilized beings, and sends an expedition of
historians and archaeologists to investigate these "keys to our own
past".  The trouble is, each of the investigators sent down to the
planet, and even some on the mother ship, begin to rediscover instincts
of feeling and involvement:  hatred of a dictator for whom literacy is a
capital crime, support for a peasant rebellion, and (well, whaddya
expect) passionate sex.  The question that arises -- whether the
advanced civilization has really gained more than it has lost -- is left
cleverly unresolved by a sudden turn, not so much of plot as of meaning,
near the end of the film.

     Production values are uneven.  The German director, Peter
Fleischmann, shot this film in the Ukraine and in Soviet Central Asia.
The actors speak German (and perhaps other languages) but are dubbed in
English; and the version that I saw was subtitled in French as well.
The dubbing quality is spotty -- I sometimes had to read the French to
find out what was being said.  The actors are uniformly good but not
more than that.  Special effects are low-budget 1970s technology (the
film was made over the period from 1986 to 1990).

     There are a number of allusions to classic films; some are handled
better than others.  About half of the mountain-travel scenes look like
the finale of THE SEVENTH SEAL (this gets weary after a while).  There
is a take-off on the bar scene in STAR WARS where we first meet Han Solo
and an interplanetary zoo of drunken revelers; here the zoo is entirely
human, but just as uncivilized.  The communications officer aboard the
mother ship follows the traditions of her genre from STAR TREK to
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA:  female, cute, sensitive and lit from below.

     From a science fiction point of view, there are the usual gripes
about instantaneous interstellar communications and space aliens who
somehow speak the same language as the denizens of the newly-discovered
planet.  Overall, however, the plot is very good (in spite of some
unnecessarily gory battle scenes), and Fleischmann has succeeded in
maintaining a rhythm that sustains interest without getting in the way
of the more philosophical issues that underly the story.

     Recommended for fans of good science fiction who can overlook the
film's technical shortcomings.

--
Mark James  <[email-masked]> or <[email-masked]>