Director – Seri Beiseu, Screenplay – Natalya Lebedeva & Dmitriy Zhigalov, Producers – Aleksandr Denisiuk, Victor Denisyuk, Vladimir Denisyuk, Alexander Kurinskiy, Evgeny Melentyev & Nikolay Tabashnikov, Photography – Kirill Zotkin, Music – Konstanin Poznekov, Art Direction – Yulia Charandaeva. Production Company – Condor Entertainment/KD Studios.
Cast
Egor Koreshkov (Steve Ross), Alyona Konstantinova (Amy Ross), Konstantin Samoukov (Ryan Connell), Nikita Dubanov (Frank Miller), Elizaveta Martinez Kardenaz (Leona Redwood), Victor Potapeshkin (Richard Wilson), Petr Romanov (Peter Lehman)
Plot
Earth is dying due to a virus that is destroying plantlife. Hope is found with the discovery of a cave containing a warp drive and a sphere. It is believed that this has been left four billion years ago by aliens who were intending to terraform Earth. Steve Ross now heads Project Gemini, a ship to be sent to another star system using the warp drive. Their intent is to open the sphere on a planet there and create the conditions for Earth Two. The ship is launched but something happens immediately after they enter the warp. They emerge at a different destination where the crew have no idea where they are. They land on the planet and find the conditions suitable to open the sphere there. However, the journey through the warp has also unleashed a creature from inside the sphere that seems intent on hunting them.
Russian fantastic cinema of the late 2010s/2020s is producing some of the most exciting genre content in the world at the moment. The last few years have produced some excellent works that often sit in the intersectional area between science-fiction and horror with the likes of The Blackout (2019), Sputnik (2020) and The Superdeep (2010). (See Russian Cinema for a more detailed listing). Project Gemini was a directorial debut for Seri Beiseu (that’s the name on the credits, although the IMDB insists on calling him Serik Beyseu).
Project Gemini starts off with a big conceptual reach – the first ever journey via warp drive (although what we have looks more like it is through a wormhole); a group of astronauts on their way to seed an alien planet and create a new Earth – only for them to emerge somewhere where they have no idea where they are. Variations on such a premise have worked well for everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to tv shows like Lost in Space (1965-8), Space: 1999 (1975-7) and Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001).
The film has some standout effects of the ship leaving orbit, going through the wormhole, arriving at the new world etc. All of this seems promising but Project Gemini manages to miss the boat in large ways. The arrival at the unknown planet plot seems filled with interesting possibilities but the characters are an anonymous bunch. Moreover, the only viewing version of the film I could find was one where the Russian original had been dubbed into English for Netflix and the characters given English names. While a worthy job has been done in at least matching mouth movements etc, the delivery of the dialogue is flat and makes the characters seem awkward.
Konstantin Samoukov and the alien from the sphere
It is not long before the film is tripping over its Alien (1979) references – the scenes with the crew on a journey through an inhospitable terrain to deliver the sphere to a cave resembles the journey into the abandoned Engineer’s ship. In particular, the scenes where the sphere seems to have given birth to some sort of creature that stalks the crew through the hallways of the ship but remains in the shadows and is almost never seen fall very much into the Alien mold. Added to that is the mutating crewman, another standby of the Alien-influenced mini-genre. The film feels like it didn’t need the monster and mutating crewman but as though someone along the production end of things decided it needed to be there.
What kills the film though is the ridiculous shaggy dog twist about two thirds of the way through where [PLOT SPOILERS] it is revealed that the team have travelled to another planet but into Earth’s past. It is like the twist ending of Planet of the Apes (1968) turned on its head. The film slots into being a closed timeloop where the script seriously abuses the concept of quantum entanglement to go out on an ending not dissimilar to Altered States (1980) – a reiteration of the whole love conquers time and space idea. It is something that might have worked in a B-budget Alien copy from New World Pictures in the 1980s but with the big self-important polish the film gets, it feels like conceptual overreach.
