Dead Mountaineers' Hotel: Moralizing about a Soviet Officer's Duties
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| Remote hotel resort, check. But this is not in Colorado – and not from The Shining. |
By Cseperke TIKÁSZ
When extraterrestrials arrive for an invasion and superheros stand up to save the world, as in more than one such movie that we can remember, police usually get only a faceless supporting role. But not in Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, a Soviet
movie from the 1970s. Here we get to see an ordinary police officer's reaction to an encounter of this kind.
In fact, Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel is a Soviet-Estonian movie. The story was
written by the famous Strugatsky brothers (Boris and Arkady) and it was played by Estonian
actors. The original copy is in Estonian, and it was only later dubbed to Russian by
Lenfilm.
Briefly, the plot features somewhere in the Alps a resort called Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel where our Inspector Glebsky arrives. Soon the hotel
is cut off from the outside world by an avalanche, and strange things begin to happen. We have two
dead, a bunch of unanswered questions and Inspector Glebsky tries to solve
the mystery.
-----THERE BE SPOILERS FROM HEREON----
Not telling you everything, Inspector Glebsky finally figures
out that aliens are here, and that they -- unlucky ones -- met some "terrorists" first, of all human beings on the planet. Upon realizing
that they ran into some really nasty people, these aliens are trying to flee our world. But in the course of their attempt to do so, some dead bodies turn up in the hotel, and Inspector Glebsky launches an investigation.
He believes in aliens no more than in their need for his help. So the terrorists come back in the end, and they kill the aliens.
The movie ends with the monologue of Inspector Glebsky. He reflects on the tough dilemma between filling his duty as a police officer and his belief that
aliens do not exist and that therefore they cannot be helped. He cannot reconcile these two notions.
He continues to have doubts if he made the right decision... Some Soviet officials may have been (or should have been?) asking themselves similar moral questions about the nature of Soviet Communism and the sort of duties they had to fulfill under it...
To conclude, you may be wondering at this point about where we watch all these Soviet Sci-Fi films in Budapest? This semester, the Department of Russian Studies at ELTE University is organising its second series of screenings of Soviet-Russian science-fiction movies, screening one movie every month. Solaris was the first to be featured in the current series, and we wrote about it here.
Every movie starts with an introduction by one of the department's students. In this case it was extremely useful because the student giving the introduction read the book by the Strugatsky brothers. Without his insights and explanations, understanding the movie could have been rather difficult. So be prepared for this if you decide to see Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel!
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