August. Eighth (2012)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Frankly: current state of Russian cinema seems fairly low, you have to be real "patriot" to find any jokes in todays' Russian comedies or any fun in action movies (IMHO).The bigger was surprise from "August 8th" - it got my 8/10 just for being able to watch it till closing credits and don't die from boredom. Bravo! I would even suppose that this movie would be suitable for international auditory, at least it's much more entertaining than any direct-to-video Seagal/VanDamme/Lundgren "product".OK, Russian actors and script-writers still need to strive to reach any level of realism in dialogs which are are too long and non-convincing here and there, scene of "orgasm in elevator" bravely stolen from Harry & Sally (well, actually it's tribute, heroine has it on DVD), but mechanical, F/X and battle parts of the movie are almost perfect.Frankly, I cannot even recall any recent movie where realism of the field battle was close enough to August 8th. "Battle Los Angeles" is probably being closest. Director is definitely big fan of hardware, almost 50 consecutive seconds of the movie we can see how a bus is being torn in pieces, including demonstration of all it's mechanical "intestines", really rare episode of this kind. For soldiers CRAWLING (not running) in houses, less than heroic (i.e. real world) deaths on both conflicting sides - for all this my big thanks to director and his military consultants.Last but not least is that you can mark battle scenes as "based on real events" - unfortunately this sign today is often attached to movies with almost no ties to reality. Here, on the contrary, almost all battle episodes of the movie are based on actual events, including "big ambush" on one of convoys, "live shield" by tank without ammo and many others.Watching those episodes is highly recommended even if you get a copy of this movie without dubbing, consider it "Black Hawk Down" in miniature.

This movie is supposed to be a patriotic movie about the events happened in August 2008. First of all, it is totally unclear to me, why a Russian movie was shot in a Hollywood blockbuster style. Russian cinema is able of producing its own solid motion pictures without copying foreign movies. Secondly, as seen from the first scene of the movie, there were people able of making good computer graphics involved in production. A young boy imagines a robot fighting forces of evil. The total disappointment is that later in the movie these computerized characters appear so often, that the movie genre slowly deviates from drama and military to family. Many times at the end of the movie I wished that finally monsters disappeared and I could understand what was really going on. From my point of view, it was absolutely unnecessary to include that much computer graphics, it just takes attention away. Thirdly, some events are shown in a very impressive way, but their plausibility is low. Why would Georgians use very expensive missiles to shoot single targets like a bus, a truck, or even people tracking them using cellular phone signal (is that even possible?). Georgian armed forces can't afford that. Before Americans made some investments in the armed forces, Georgia had pretty much what was left from the times when Georgia was a part of the USSR. The scene with the bus splitting into halves could make some movies like "Final destination" look pale, but, again, it looks so unreal! An actor named Vladimir Vdovichenkov played the president. He is a nice actor, with many roles in action movies, but he wasn't the president of the Russian Federation back in 2008! Lots of movies star actors resembling American presidents, why couldn't the same be done in this movie? Fourthly, the boys behaviour needs some medical attention. Frightened, stressed, he doesn't call mom for help, as a normal kid would do. Only when his mother pretends to be a robot (and he pretends to be "Kosmoboy"), he agrees to communicate using MMS messages on the cellular phone. There are some very solid and dynamic combat episodes withing the movie, nicely shot. But that's about it. Overall, this is a very light and not serious movie with annoyingly too much emphasis on computer graphics. I think the director intended for movie watchers to empathize the characters, but the actors play is lame, so I felt nothing. If you want to see a good movie about the 5-day war in August of 2008th, a movie that creates a proper atmosphere, watch Olympius Inferno.

Of course this movie is a propaganda, but a very good one. That's how propaganda movies should be made! The movie is not about the message that is shouted in your face, but rather about how it makes you feel - at the right time, for the right reason, with the right character. I liked pretty much everything about this movie - the script, the dialogs, character development, action scenes. I've read some concerns about main girl character who's acting did not seem to be convincing early in the movie, but I think it was done on purpose, as a contrast, to show that behind urban glamour still hides Russian Woman that was praised in the world art and literature. Thus dedication of the movie to the mothers. Bottom line is: at last we see some nice action drama coming from Russia that we would not be ashamed of. Highly recommend.

The plot tells a story of young Muscovite Ksenia who sends her son to Caucasus to be with his father, her Ossetian ex-husband. Suddenly the war breaks out in the region, and Ksenia has to fly down there to rescue her child. Fayziev said that his heroine isn't suited for anything but mundane household dramas. Yet she has to go through the war experience and can't let herself get tired, refuse or complain, because she doesn't have a choice.The girl is annoying in the beginning, a bad mom in a miniskirt who cares only about her boyfriend. Then the character develops, she grows to be a decent mother who even understands how to cope with a breakdown of her son, who starts to hide from war in a world of imaginary robots. The film reminded me of Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" because of the kid's way to protect himself from terror. The film has quite a crew: talented young actors, screenwriter Michael Lerner, who worked for 20 years as a war correspondent for Newsweek, Oscar-nominated film editor Dennis Virkler, Oscar-awarded sound producer Bob Bimmer ("Speed" and "Gladiator") and talented computer graphics coordinator Sergei Nevshupov ("Lord of The Rings" and "Avatar"). Animation consultant on the set was Alexander Dorogov, who's known for his work with Walt Disney Feature Animation. Fayziev said he initially planned foreign professionals on key production roles, "so that they showed us how to do decent movies correctly and to speed up the process."We are used here to prefer Hollywood movies to local, because the latter are less visual. Well, this one pulls the image pretty well and might be the first made on such a level in Russia.