Guardians (2017)
So back in probably 2016, I remember a video going around that claimed to be a trailer for a Russian superhero movie. Being a denizen of the internet, I am fairly used to videos like these coming and going while never having the advertised product come to fruition (SFX Rayforce, I’m looking at you!) and I forgot about it. Fast forward to about a year ago and talking to some friends we discussed how there’s so much superhero media now and it’s so widely accepted. I brought up how there was some Russian superhero video from a couple years ago and as usual I was the only one who knew about it because I am Very Online™. In looking it all back up I found out that they ACTUALLY MADE THE MOVIE. The meme-worthy video of a half-bear man and some super fast edgelord guy with a pair of ridiculous semi-circle sabres actually made it to print.
So Avengers came out in 2012 and, while it isn’t the first movie with a superhero team in it, I can say with confidence that this movie is ripping off Avengers. For about the first act we deal with the setup that a secret government agency called Patriot (definitely not S.H.I.E.L.D.) existed in the Soviet Union and worked on a number of secret projects that would protect the Union from United States aggression. After an explanation of what created these super people, we have to go and recruit them which was reminiscent of a collection of scenes from various pre-Avengers films.
The team ends up consisting of the aforementioned edgelord and man-bear joined by an older looking man with the ability to manipulate rocks and a woman whose powers include turning invisible (but really she just turns into water?) and holding a really great power stance in every full body shot of her. Actually, let’s talk about a super power that seems to exist but no one mentions it. At first I noticed that the woman (Ksenia according to the subs but I’ve seen it spelled Xenia according to Wikipedia) is represented by a CGI model that looks as if she’s nude but when she goes into her water form she is wearing clothes and when she comes back she’s also wearing clothes. I didn’t think much of it until later on in the movie they make a point that the suit she’s given WILL TURN INTO WATER/TURN INVISIBLE WITH HER. So as far as I can tell, yes she IS naked whenever that happens and they just didn’t bother trying to do some tasteful camerawork to do the implied nudity thing. Now I know someone reading this might say “Oh yeah of course you want to see or imagine the attractive woman without clothes” and to that I say that while I might that’s beside the point. It’s an odd fucking thing to happen. Really it would bother me less if they didn’t mention the super suit would turn invisible with her because I would just assume it was too hard to model the clothes on her CGI body. Besides that, Ursus the bear-man has his own wardrobe issues at least twice in the movie. Most of the time, he turns into a half-man, half-bear kind of werebear monster. Twice in the movie, he goes “Full Bear Mode” and just becomes a complete grizzly bear and starts mauling people. Twice they make a point of showing his pants rip off. Twice HIS PANTS JUST MAGICALLY RE-APPEAR. Now, I admit that one of these times he could have partially reverted and just taken the pants off one of the faceless horde enemies that the team had been dispatching left and right. The second time? No way, there’s literally no possible way for him to have pants again. As a full-blown bear he’s hanging from a plane by a rope, the rope gets cut and he falls into a river. He climbs out of the river and this motherfucker grew some goddamn pants. No faceless mook anywhere around to steal another pair of pants this time.
So anyway, going back to the team, there isn’t much to talk about in terms of character. The best part of the MCU is that, with individual movies, each member of the team-up are already well-established and the movie at hand can just skip introductions and backstory so as to flesh out villains, plot, what-have-you. Because all these characters (villain and supporting cast included) are all being introduced in this film simultaneously, none of them are very well fleshed out. Ursus is apparently a scientist and worried about the internal animal taking over. The edgelord swordsman, Khan, holds some guilt over killing his brother and has a hobby of killing Asian people wearing suits who drive at him in humvees with machine guns. Ler regrets leaving his family behind and resents having been made into the superhuman he is now. Xenia doesn’t remember her past. Yeah, she got shafted THAT BADLY.
Honestly, the writing is the weakest part of the movie, and in my opinion the only weak part. The whole thing feels rushed because there’s so much ground to cover in a single film. The ideas in the movie aren’t even that bad in the realm of superhero fiction, it entirely comes down to there just being too much happening to create a cohesive film. The acting is good enough; I feel like I was getting enough out of the people on screen to pick up on some details not outright stated in the film (and even then only hinted at in the closing scene before the credits). I think the only acting I could complain about was Ler’s use of the magnetic/electric/rock-whip they gave him in the upgrade scene.
Speaking of that abomination of a weapon, we should talk about the special effects. There were some fine practical effects, stuff like cars being crushed by tanks and whatnot. The generic henchmen actually had kind of a cool design, as they were clones of Kuratov augmented with some electronic pieces. The CGI, however, was a bit dated considering the year this came out. I would not, however, hold it against this film. It didn’t look any worse than 2018’s Venom, and the only reason it’s okay that the symbiotes in that movie get away with looking like shiny plastic is because they’re goopy sludge monsters. The transformation seqence that Ursus goes through looks pretty good, and the bear and bear-man models would have fit in side-by-side with Hulk in the first couple of his movies.
Overall, the movie isn’t bad. There’s some commentary in the Wikipedia page (used for name accuracy and plot reference) that supposedly this movie is at the top of some Russian news broadcasting company’s list of worst movies of all time and I have to say that’s a ridiculous notion. I wouldn’t advocate for this movie to be winning any awards but it’s honestly fun with some great scenes that you only get through superhero genre films, like a bear charging through paramilitary armed with an automatic machinegun on his back. If you go into this with an open mind it’s worth the time, just ignore that cliffhanger after-credits scene for the sequel that got canceled.
Final Verdict: Semi-Sweet
