Salyut-7 (2017)

directed by Klim Shipenko

Russia

106 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I watched this for Yuri's Night/Cosmonautics Day. Usually my picks for the occasion tend to lean more towards the imaginative, science-fiction side of things, but I think this was a good choice since it's basically nothing if not a spotlight on cosmonaut heroics, and there are portraits of Yuri Gagarin in the background here and there, as any good Russian space film that knows its history will have. This is definitely one of those movies that feels like it's a very conscious of being A Movie™, a feeling which is difficult for me to describe but entails a sense - more intrusive than usual - that everything you're seeing is embellished to perfection and choreographed for maximum entertainment value. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because we all like to be entertained, and Salyut-7 absolutely achieves that factor, but it loses a little relatability in the process.

This is a movie that's based on real events, but is highly fictionalized outside of the basic fact that a rescue mission to the drifting, uncontrolled Salyut-7 craft really did occur. You can of course find all of this on Wikipedia, but in short, the Salyut-7 space station experienced a malfunction in an electrical sensor that determined when batteries needed charging, leading to it losing power, going wildly off-course, and becoming uncontrollable from the ground. There were no people in the station at the time, but the way things were going, it would eventually crash somewhere on Earth, and without power no one had any control over where that would be. Two pilots, Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh, were sent up on a ridiculously difficult mission to dock with Salyut-7 and bring it back under control. Wikipedia's article is fairly terse on this subject, but they did, amazingly, manage to dock with an out-of-control, freely rotating object, apparently using handheld laser rangefinders, get inside, and conduct the repairs needed to bring the station out of its frozen state and back to something a little more manageable. Ironically, the station did eventually end up undergoing an uncontrolled reentry in 1991, and crashed somewhere in Argentina.

Dzhanibekov and Savinykh are our two protagonists, with Dzhanibekov arguably being the main focus. At the beginning of the film, he's banned from further missions after an incident during a different emergency in space where he sees something inexplicable, claiming that "angels" visited him during a spacewalk. This is really fascinating because it bookends the film. Both him and Savinykh experience the same phenomenon during their isolation together while repairing the Salyut-7. Such a small thing actually ended up being possibly my favorite detail of this film, because I love the way the film just allows this event to let lie, doesn't explain it, just gives room to this impossible, supernatural event as a way of letting a sense of the miraculous remain in a story set against the rational, reactionary backdrop of the Cold War. The bureaucrats try to manage Dzhanibekov's experience, try to suggest factors that contributed to his seeing something that wasn't there, but the beauty and mystery of space refuses to be explained away.

This looks, on the surface, very much like one of those movies of a kind that you've certainly seen before where the achievements of one or two people are valorized above a greater whole. Most of the time I have no stomach for this viewpoint, because it ignores the fact that singular heroes almost always have a pool of other people surrounding them during their time of heroic deeds. But this time I feel like the portrayal was mostly fair. The team back on Earth, calculating exactly what it'll take to dock with the rogue station, guiding the cosmonauts, and contributing math and ideas to the effort, is incredibly important here. At the end of the day, it's true that there were only two people in that ship, that they had support and training from back home, but there were two sets of hands alone that accomplished the actual mechanics of docking with the station. But it's also true that they couldn't have done any of it without mission control. Both cosmonauts are still alive, with obscene amounts of medals and awards and both with planets named after them. Dzhanibekov went on to go into politics, photography, and, uh, attempting to circumnavigate the globe by balloon, apparently, and is now only 80 - I know, "only" 80, but when you watch movies like this for some reason you always imagine the people in them to either be dead or like a hundred years old.

Most of Salyut-7's appeal is visual. All of the CGI used to accomplish what would be a pretty dead movie without it is more than up to snuff. If nothing else about it grabs you, the sheer power of the EVA scenes will grab you. I don't think there's anybody out there who has seen a movie involving a spacewalk scene and not gotten sweaty palms - it's that feeling of being totally unmoored, attached only by the thinnest of tethers to a huge object that is itself floating through space controlled partly by you and partly by what people thousands of miles away are telling you to do. It's horrifying, and when the cosmonauts are cast against the looming Earth or the rising sun, it's also horrifyingly beautiful. You can't have a good space movie without that sense of terror and beauty, and Salyut-7 is up to the task, cinematography-wise. There's one scene that's going to stick with me, of the fire in the ship that leaves Savinykh injured: Dzhanibekov watching from outside, helpless, as his friend is trapped in what rapidly becomes a corked bottle full of fire. This is one out of many fictionalized aspects of the film; there was no such fire onboard the ship, and a lot of what happens to make the repair and return of the cosmonauts seem nearly impossible was just invented wholecloth. But man, watching it makes you feel. All in all I don't have much of a problem with the invented details because you can look all this up and find out easily what really happened - I see this movie as kind of a metaphor for heroics more than a record of real things, a way of saying how difficult the repair mission was and telling its story in a more sensational way.

So this is a fun movie that you probably shouldn't watch if you'd rather watch a space documentary because it doesn't have all its facts straight (on purpose). It's a movie - it makes stuff up so that you'll have a good time watching it. My favorite part of the film is when the two main characters are discussing why it is that cosmonauts, despite being such manly men, always seem to have daughters, and they both conclude that it's because girls are cool.