The Russian Woodpecker (2015)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This documentary presents numerous speculations about the Chernobyl disaster (most notably alleging that it may have been an 'inside job' done to cover up a costly failed Soviet intelligence project).The film clearly doesn't seem to know whether to back these wild notions and thus 'expose the conspiracy', or to let them represent the troubled/visionary mind of the artist-protagonist Fedor Alexandrovich. It hedges its bets, rather like a horoscope its meaning is largely down to you.This leaves the film with a conspicuous absence in the place where its core integrity should be. I saw this at a festival with filmmaker present and he gave open-ended answers regarding to the conspiracy angle when questioned by the audience. This leaves the film with an artificial range of interpretation, because it lacks any real conviction of its own. It should be noted that some of the footage is great, but unfortunately the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

In the world of IIO and misinformation, the known fascist right sector/Svoboda actions in Maidan, including mounting evidence of right sector sniping their very own to force the 'new Ukraine'; we find in this 'Russian woodpecker', an American cuckoo. A 'contrivation' of CIAHollywood/Joel Harding proportion.An artist-proclaimed in the flyer as cult-hero, BUT only in the producers dreams. A noble quest and the evils of empire surround the making of this sophisticated propaganda piece. Why 'Victoria NULAND' s name doesn't feature in the credits alongside 'Yats' and the 5 billion USAID put into the coup d'état, can only be oversight on the NY side of the operation. But. They say disinformation has to contain truth, or it doesn't serve. And who knows whether the central premiss is correct? We know that Governments murder their own citizens -even the remotest fool knows 911 was an inside job- but to hide the facts of right sector /USA involvement in the coup behind this heroic sentimentality rap, is anti-history and can only place the makers of this work as myth makers. propagandists. To feature the terrible famine, but not Ukrainian fascist SS committing Babi-Yar...and their descendants running the Ukrainian Rada hand-in-hand with USAMO, is a crime of conscience.

Artist Fedor Alexandrovich is a force to be reckoned with in this riveting documentary. As a child he was a resident of Chernobyl when the nuclear disaster happened. As an adult in the Ukraine the rising tensions there compel him to go in search of the answers surrounding the events of 1986. This is a must watch; Alexandrovich is a character that will stay with you. Although Chernobyl is a distant memory to most of us in the West for Alexandrovich and countless other people from the former USSR it has left a lasting legacy of not only physical illness but also mental trauma. The recent events in the Ukraine also get a look in and you get to see what occurred from the point of view of those inside.

This is supposedly a documentary about a Ukrainian named Fedor who discovers that the Chernobyl disaster was in fact no accident. The "hero" of the movie, an eccentric and somewhat "touched" young artist, tries (along with a few friends) to find the true cause of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, then plans to expose it to the world. After they painstakingly attempt to prove the explosion was a plot by one Soviet official who needed to save his skin after investing enormous government funds in a failed Cold War project, they suddenly jump to the conclusion, completely unfounded even in the context of their own "research", that Chernobyl was a Soviet-engineered Ukrainian genocide. Then, when Fedor secretly confides to his friend that the secret police are going to hurt his family if he continues with the project; his friend secretly records the conversation and includes it in the movie. One might first wonder what kind of friend would subject a person close to him to repercussions by the secret police, but in the context of the movie one is expected to forgive him as he is sacrificing Fedor for the greater good (telling the truth about the evil Russians). However, it makes a lot more sense if in fact the secret police never visited Fedor, and the scene was just made up to provide the most damning "proof" that Chernobyl was no accident to make the Russians look bad (they even state in the film that this is that ultimate proof, because if the secret police visit you to make you say something didn't happen, it clearly did). One might imagine that if the secret police, presented in the movie as a powerful and unscrupulous force, didn't want to the film made, they would have been much more effective and the viewer would never have seen it. A more interesting layer of the film is the creation of the character Fedor, a Ukrainian holy fool in the tradition of Basil the Blessed and others whose words are believed to be from god, who are able to foresee the future, and who, from time to time, run around naked. Unfortunately this may be less an interesting artistic device and more a technique to allow the hero to make all sorts of claims without having to back them up with logic or proof. The most egregious of these claims, of which there are many, is that Russia is trying to start WWIII. In fact, inflammatory propaganda films like this one are themselves extremely dangerous, as they sow fear and misunderstanding between Russia and the West at a time when honesty, understanding, and levelheaded thinking are so critical. Ultimately, the real conspiracy here may the attempt to pass off a fictional movie as a documentary. Unfortunately, if "The Russian Woodpecker" hadn't pretended to be a documentary, it would have been far more interesting aesthetically and far less troubling ethically. In fact, it is little more than an anti-Russian diatribe.