https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfjuNOvCY1Q
Before Hard to be a God was a hit video game, it was a novel by the indispensible Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, adapted into a 1989 film starring Werner Herzog. And now it’s been adapted into a new, black-and-white film that looks incredibly grueling and intense.
In Hard to be a God, scientists from Earth travel to an alien planet that’s stuck in a Medieval level of civilization, oppressed by a brutal religion. Theodore Stugeon praised Hard to be a God as “one of the most beautifully written, heavily freighted SF novels I have ever read.”
This movie version is the final work of the late Alexei German, released posthumously in Rotterdam, where it was described thusly:
The planet Arkanar looks like a medieval hell ruled by totalitarian
evil. A messenger from Earth has a mission to introduce humanitarian
ideas, unaware that they don’t always work. A stunning black-and-white
fresco of a world that lost its chance to be saved. A farewell from one
of the greatest Russian filmmakers.Alexei German, who died in
2013, was always a fierce critic of authority. In his last film, he
looks into the ultimate hierarchy: that of God and man. On the planet
Arkanar, which halted its development in the Middle Ages, there are 30
terrestrial scientists. Don Rumata and his colleagues observe Arkanar
with the knowledge of everything that could happen, but they cannot
intervene. They are helpless gods in a world in which intellectuals are
hunted like game.
And here’s a teaser trailer that came out recently as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ68bwBScRI
[via Twitch Film]
