But, to quote from a pivotal scene in Parker & Stone’s The Book of Mormon: it’s a metaphor. If we take the plot literally, then, yes, The Promised Heavens is a film involving aliens. indeed, that’s the point, as the film is about faith at a time when faith seems ludicrous. But when the President and his comrades climb aboard an old steam train that was abandoned years before they were, the train ascends into the clouds, presumably taking the President’s group off to the alien promised land in the sky. By the end of the film, the aliens have not appeared, and our homeless heroes are surrounded by the police.
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But the self-proclaimed “president” of the landfill has an answer: he has been contacted by aliens who are ready to take them all away to a better world. In this bittersweet and charming movie, a collection of elderly homeless men and women, many of whom had been brought low by the destruction of the Soviet system, have been living on a landfill, only to find out that their new “home” is about to be demolished to make room for a condom factory. As Irina Souch reminds us in her recently-published monograph Popular Tropes and Identity in Contemporary Russian Television and Film, just one week after the failed August coup attempt against Gorbachev set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the official dismantling of the USSR, Eldar Riaznov released a film that, on the cusp of the Soviet and post-Soviet era, serves as an elegy for a vanishing world: The Promised Heavens (Небеса обетованные). Post-Soviet cinema has been similarly reluctant to have its earthbound heroes share screen time with aliens from outer space. For him, science fiction serves the same purpose as biblical myth in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe: it provides a set of familiar yet resonant tropes that help us think about catastrophe. Completely uninterested in the conventions of science fiction, Bykov produces a fantasy about alien visitation whose contrivances are only barely plausible. Readers of Bykov’s Living Souls (ЖД) will not be surprised to find that the author’s attitude towards group identity is playful and skeptical even in the beginning of the novel, the “alien” is so much like a human Muscovite that the differences are hardly worth nothing, while the ending suggests that it is easier to find the true Other back at home. When they arrive, the homeworld turns out to be just as chaotic and dangerous as Earth, so they turn around and go back to where they started.
#RUSSIA ALIEN INVASION SERIES#
When Moscow is threatened by a series of terrorist attacks, he reveals that this role-playing game is actually real, and volunteers to evacuate his beloved (along with a few other random people they meet along the way) to his more advanced homeworld.
#RUSSIA ALIEN INVASION HOW TO#
Dmirty Bykov’s 2005 novel The Evacuator focuses on a man and a woman who seem to be engaging in a linguistic erotic fantasy, where the man claims to be an alien and teaches the woman how to speak his language (much of which sounds like baby-talk versions of actual Russian words). Aliens did come to Post-Soviet Russia, but only occasionally.
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Yet contemporary Russia never became a popular tourist destination among the interplanetary set. With the abolition of literary censorship and the rise of market-oriented publishing, fantasy and science fiction in Russia greatly expanded their foothold in the bookstores after 1991, and not only thanks to the influx of translated material. It can also be found at . You can also find all the previous entries here.
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This is the ninth entry of Russia’s Alien Nations: The Secret Identities of Post-Socialism, an ongoing feature on All the Russias.