Atlantis

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🎙️ EPISODE 681: 04.04.23 HEADLINE: THE SQUIRREL GOES INTERNATIONAL DAY. After visiting Senegal, we venture to the Ukraine. Why do we call it the Ukraine? We don't call Russia the Russia? It's all connected after all. Even a squirrel can see that. What we have here is one of the ultimate examples of life imitating art. Eerie and combustive, thusly. Somebody else wrote these words: "The film's subject matter – an all-out war between Ukraine and Russia, in which Ukraine is able to hold back a theoretically superior Russian force – was seen by some critics and audiences as "prophetic" when the Russo-Ukrainian War sharply escalated the year after the film's release with the Russian invasion of Ukraine." But maybe "prophetic" isn't the right word. Sharps had "war" at +120. A minor upset.

Traditional narrative is absence, much like the absence of [insert pretty much anything here] during wartime or post-wartime. One character remarks that war is short compared to how long it takes to recover from war. This almost feels like a series of vignettes and the way it is shot, in these long static wide view angles, you can't connect to any character in the way you're accustomed to, which obviously seems like the point. There are characters. A man. A woman. Another man who jumps into a vat of cooking steel or whathaveyou...

But the main man is this man, that dead man's friend. PTSD say what now...


The long takes are hypnotic. It feels good reducing them to short gifs...


Billed as a "dystopian effort" but, uh, yeah, we might need a new word for that now, hmm? We see our guy at home making a little figurine out of wire or something by a fire, target shooting men in the background, the figure in silhouette against the light of the fire, a lovely composition...


There are a few moments of handheld camera movement to break things up. Then we see the best DIY jacuzzi that ever was...


Static scene. A little movement. Static scene. Static scene. Static scene, like the wallpaper in hell. Sex scene (slow zoom). If this van's a rockin' then don't come a knockin' (the corpses in the back might have become zombies, ya know).

The penultimate scene is shot in infrared. Such a cool, unnatural shot. It reminds you this is just a movie. This hell is real; it exists. But this isn't it. Not this, not right now, what you're watching. This is just a rendering of something that could or already has become real...

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 680 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 682 ⫸

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Atlantis (Ukrainian: Атлантида) is a 2019 Ukrainian dystopian post-apocalyptic film directed by Valentyn Vasyanovych. It was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. At the 76th Venice International Film Festival, the film won the award for Best Film in the Horizons section. It was selected as the Ukrainian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards, but it was not nominated. None of the roles in this movie were played by actors, but rather by veterans, volunteers, and soldiers. One of the main roles was played by Andriy Rymaryk, a former military scout, who went through the War in Donbas and currently works at Come Back Alive, a Ukrainian NGO that helps Ukrainian soldiers through crowdfunding. Of note, paramedic Liudmyla Bileka and volunteer Vasyl Antoniak were also in the film. It was released on September 4, 2019.