Moscow Zero (2006)

Absolutely Fantastic

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

This line is a good summary of this movie. If you have read it, and watched 20 minutes of the movie, you will know exactly how the rest of the movie is going to behave. Some researcher named Surgei (pronounced SirGay) are searching for hell in the underworld of Moscow. However he seems to have disappeared, and his friend Oven follows with a team to search after him. Could they have find a more boring plot? Some bad actors looking after an old man in the underground. The acting is very bad, the romance really feels pointless and untrue, often there is no good reason for the way the characters are acting, nothing is scary and most of all: there's not happening anything interesting in the whole, entire movie. They just walk, asking some gang leaders and other guys about the way, walk some more, complain some, finds the old man, and then they run, and finally finds the way out of the underground.The only thing that provides me from giving this movie the lowest of all ratings is the atmosphere. If you just want to see a movie for that, this may be a good choice. It's dark, and it's mystical and murky. However, the rest of the movie is really dull. You just sit there all the time, waiting for the movie to begin or something to happening. It's actually happening some things, but they are not very well performed. For example, i didn't really notice when one of the characters disappeared, and I swear I wasn't sleeping or something. And I don't understand what's dangerous with these children... They just run around in the underground together, scratching it walls with sticks (I suppose it is meant to be scary in some way).Just watch this movie if you are in immediate need of some murky atmospheres.

I must say the movie is highly under-rated in IMDb. We are not looking here for a typical FBI Thriller or a romantic plot. It is a discovery of a legend by Sergei and this leads to so many discoveries. Although the movie is mostly set in dark and closed alleys, but it was well shot and actually depicts the real feeling as if you are inside that place as defined in the plot.It is a 'different' kind of a movie and it is actually very nicely done. The story has been treated well.The Sister tried to protect the kids from daemons that lived at higher levels... and I presume all the kids and the sister died of hunger... But what was not clear is why would children (shadows of daemons) kill people who would come down... Well maybe because all of them had to sacrifice their lives and die of hunger.

Sit in your basement with the light out for an hour and a half. That's about the same as watching this subterranean search for the Devil's door. An American researcher Owen(Vincent Gallo)travels to Moscow and gathers a rescue team to search for his friend Sergei(Rade Serbedzia), an archaeologist who has disappeared in the catacombs beneath Russia's capital city. They will be shocked to discover subterranean dwellers thriving in the dank and dark complex system of caves and tunnels. The searchers will come upon the gatekeeper of Hell, Andrey(Val Kilmer), and will strike a deal to continue their venture; only to succeed in being scared almost witless when realizing they are among walking dead. Also in the cast: Joaquin de Almedia, Oksana Akinshina, Sage Stallone, Joss Ackland and Julio Perillan.

MOSCOW ZERO is a really dark, mystical and supernatural film. The plot is very straight to follow since it's just about a quest to find SERGEI (played by Rade Serbedzija) an old friend of the father OWEN (played by Vincent Gallo) that went to the catacombs of Moscow alone. The entire movie is passed in there. Though the film has a very open ending, which is, by the way, very well connected to the mysterious and mystical ambiance that is always present… What I appreciated the most in the film was precisely this mystical and supernatural ambiance of this story and the way it was shot. It has a great cinematography, creating very dark and claustrophobic scenarios. The soundtrack is also good, because it also has mysterious, dark, melancholic and melodic music, like a ghost story must have! One other detail that I also appreciated was the fact of the demons were characterized only as shadows, as a dark light in the underworld… I found it so much better than the traditional way of characterize demons as little monsters with sharpened teethes, horns and a back tail… I think this film is very well produced, though I agree it's a bit slow sometimes and could have been more suspenseful. However I also think this melancholy present in the plot and the soundtrack fits perfectly in a dark and mystical story like this.The acting is reasonably good, but I only would like to mention the Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida, playing YURI character… It was a surprise to me hearing him speaking some lines in Russian, but he's a "box of surprises" anyway… I also would like to say that I think this movie is too much underrated here on IMDb. I Liked this film, especially because of its ambiance as I said before, and I found pretty absurd that a user can say things like this: "There are two shameful reviews in IMDb promoting this movie and they are typically fake, written by users with only one review in this site". Just because he has more than 3000 reviews he thinks he's opinion is better than anyone else's! It's really sad… My final vote to this different but good film is 7/10.