OPINION | REVIEW: Russian homage to ‘Alien’ just thin borscht

Guillermo del Toro has had great success marrying sweeping love stories with the basic tenets of monster movies -- recall that his last film "The Shape of Water," won the Best Picture Academy Award -- but it requires both an adoration of romantic melodrama, and the vision of otherworldly creatures whose exotics read as movingly believable and thematically significant.

Russian director Egor Abramenko tries his hand at such a union with "Sputnik," but has neither the understanding of human emotions to pull off the love story, nor the visual imagination to make his creature anything more than stock (a pun which will resonate eventually).

The story involves a pair of Soviet cosmonauts in a space capsule in 1983. Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov), the commander of the two-man capsule, has dreams of becoming another Soviet hero upon his return, but before they re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, they're boarded by some unknown being. From there, we jump to their parachuted landing in Kazakhstan, where the other cosmonaut has been badly wounded, and Veshnyakov crawls out of the battered capsule in serious distress.

It turns out our young commander has been latched onto by an alien parasite, one that only comes out in the early morning hours, via his mouth, growing in size and slithering around before shrinking back down and returning to its host body again the same way it came out (fortunately, this is a special effect-laden transaction the camera doesn't much linger upon). Locked in a distant research lab overseen by the weapon-mad Commander Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk), Veshnyakov is locked up like a heavily guarded lab rat, seemingly unaware of what has happened to him.

Wanting to gain control of the fierce alien for use as an eventual weapon, and provide the Soviet government with continuing "good news," Semiradov brings in the unconventional Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina), a neuropsychiatrist with a brusque manner, and a methodology that unnerves the existing lead scientist, Yan Leonidovich (Anton Vasilev). In short order, she interviews the ailing Veshnyakov, and eventually gains his trust (and, we are to understand, romantic interest). Demanding to know everything about the creature she's been tasked with understanding, she convinces Yan to show her what is being hidden from her, a request she eventually comes to regret.

Targeted for a "Midnight" audience, the film moves in the obdurate manner of its heroine: For all her intelligence and intensity in the film's opening act, by the end, she's just another romantic, lost in love with the wrong partner. Indeed, for all her considerable skill and courageousness, so many of her plans go astray, even under the scientific rubric, you need to wonder if the board of scientists bent on expelling her from their academy before she's taken to this secret lab didn't actually have a strong case.

Given little reason for this consummate, logic-driven scientist to fall for Veshnyakov, the love story feels tacked on and, worse, trite, but the film's single biggest problem remains the alien itself. Monster pictures soar or collapse at the precise moment of revelation of what they've been scrupulously hiding: Either the creature shocks us into terror, or elicits groans and disenchantment, which renders anything else the director has captured completely moot.

The alien, which leaves a slime trail upon exiting Veshnyakov's mouth, does not terrify, or even much capture our attention. Instead, it's like a cross between a slight adolescent boy and a wombat, with the skin texture and color of a Chinese soup dumpling. True, its preferred method of killing involves grisly decapitation, but given the relative ridiculousness of its countenance, we can't ever take it -- or the film -- seriously.

To be fair, these sorts of movies tend toward the middle ground between seriousness and fable (again, this is the territory del Toro makes his own), but this film, despite its solid production values and staid pacing, clearly wants to make a strong emotional case for itself. It would have been a great deal more fun had it just embraced its more base roots.

Dour and languid becomes a bad look for a film whose monster resembles an overcooked leek (there it is!).