Why watch Zashchitniki (Защитники, 2017) at Christmas?

By Péter MARTON
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To answer the question raised in the title: I have no idea, other than: "why not." (I did it, anyway.) (Also, keep in mind that in Russia, Christmas Day is January 7, 2020.)

This actually sums up the nature of my experience with this movie well: hailed as well as ridiculed as Russia's response to the Marvel superhero universe, Zashchitniki (The Guardians) clearly entertains more when watched with little to no expectations. Or, basically, as trash, sifting through which one may strike gold sometimes. 

Which is not to say that you will strike 24-karat gold in this case — it's just the idea of why you could embark on watching the movie in the first place, or at all. The plot is of the kind that even five-year-old children could quickly come up with, given the right incentives. But that should be no reason to bash this movie too badly. The team behind it spent only 5 million dollars on it and still managed to come up with something that's not looking much worse than some of the superhero stuff they are trying to mimic (e.g. Avangers: Endgame, with its 356-million dollar budget). Even the CGI is not so bad here, meaning that it's bad... but CGI is generally extremely overrated, including in the case of the Marvel movies that similarly fail to look realistic to any extent, regardless of how much more they spend on them.

Below, I will offer a few quick thoughts on what one can make of the movie as a "cultural text", speaking to us about Russia's identity, presenting a narrative of Russian-ness, with a view also to how this resonates with some of the clichés of the superhero genre.

1. Picking up the pieces... in post-Soviet space

Just like in Tri sekundy (Three seconds), another Russian movie from a year later, the story emphasizes how those that once belonged together should (re-)unite in everyone's interest, to be able to face up to whatever challenges there are. That is, everyone from the different constituent Soviet Socialist Republics in the case of the Soviet basketball team in Three Seconds, and the members of the crew living in the different post-Soviet countries and places in Zashchitniki (the Khor Virap monastery in Armenia and Kazakhstan are featured in the film, along with Siberia and Moscow in the Russian Federation). The theme of building unity is not new to Soviet/Russian cinema, of course, but it is interesting how this is once again becoming a bit of a trend among contemporary Russian culture-makers. (Naturally, in the context of a superhero movie, this is also a leaf out of the Avengers book).

2. The integration of Islam and of Muslims... in the singular figure of Khan

The Muslim Central Asian element is present in the movie in the figure of Khan who can move and cut up people (and vehicles) really fast. He has an extremely (rather inconveniently) curved sword to wield. His inclusion is interesting, because he turns the Zashchitniki crew into a multicultural team. Of course, integration happens here through fighting for the same cause, alongside good Russians, notably, and not in the kind of everyday context that would be most remarkable from the point of view of presenting the possibility of a well-functioning multiculturality.

3. The figure of the female fighter superhero

There is not one, but two in this movie (if we count the character of Major Elena Larina as one; she is certainly a fighter herself). People studying gender's implications in society might scoff at how the main female superhero (Kseniya) has, as her superpower, the ability to become invisible (critics from the field of Gender Studies might point out that women in society are often made invisible by the power of others). But the female heroes of the Zashchitniki crew have no major difficulties asserting themselves if necessary, and fight well and acrobatically. Kseniya (rather predictably) always finds the time for a butterfly jump between two roundhouse kicks to the cheeks.

4. Stereotypical hot Russian women

Sticking with the subject of gender, I couldn't help but stop to think of "technologies of femininity" and how they are applied in very obvious ways in the case of the female characters, shaping their appearance. Even more interestingly, they are applied here to construct the ideal-type of the beautiful Russian woman as a blonde, blue-eyed, cold and reserved, but at times (when really-really appropriate) emotional and empathetic, lady in the figure of Major Elena Larina. These thus amount to technologies of Russian-ness and femininity at the same time, as such.

Major Elena Larina

Also...

5. The theme of crazy Cold War legacies... of both Soviet and U.S. policies

The film's plot originates from a Cold War era experimental weapons program of the Soviet Union, where they genetically augmented human beings to turn them into warriors with extraordinary capabilities. The villain, on the other hand, results from an explosion in a laboratory where some of the related experimentation continued under the lead of a rogue scientist well into the post-shutdown times. Clearly, dangerous things can result from explosions in Cold War era legacy labs, so this is an important theme... The movie ultimately turns the viewer's attention to the legacy of U.S. policies, too, and the story features what they mention as the "Hammer" system that the Reagan administration built supposedly to be able to destroy the world, in the framework of the Star Wars program that contributed to bankrupting the Soviet Union.

6. The military-film-industrial complex

Superhero movies are potentially highly useful media for the marketing of arms. This element does not go over the top in this movie (one might say that Russia's aerospace forces do not get a very flattering presentation at all), but the appearance of the Tornado Multiple Launch Rocket System is possibly noteworthy in this respect, given how it may be a future export item.

7. LAWs...

Lethal Autonomous Weapon systems appear in the film, and in land warfare come up against battle tanks and combat helicopters that they are shown to defeat easily, rather uncomfortably with a view to the traditional image of Russian land forces, centered as it is around main battle tanks. That the LAWs win so easily is questionable, however (as but one of many illegitimate plot elements). The tanks somehow do not benefit from active or passive defenses, while the LAWs are shown to have amazing multimodal mobility even as they carry what has to be an extremely heavy payload of missiles (including GTAMs and ATGMs) and ammunition (of various calibers). This stretches credulity not a little. Find two snapshots below of how one of the LAWs transitions in under a second from firing anti-armor munitions into a rolling evasive manoeuvre, to eventually launch an ATGM. Quite a capability, and the movie fails to have the villain use these LAWs as much as may be warranted with a view to what they could achieve (no matter how realistic that is).

8. Bears, because... of course

Where would we be without a shapeshifting superhero capable of turning into a bear in a Russian superhero movie? Right??!

Also, give that bear a chain gun to keep him happy. And that shall be (or, rather, it should have been)... The End!