like I know a lot/all of it is bs (I've learned the murder of all the funeralgoers visiting Moscow is entirely fabricated) but I thought the movie was pretty funny. does this make me a bad leftist

  • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    Nah it's an excellent movie, and like with the Chernobyl miniseries there are broader critiques of power and systems to be extracted from it. The movie and shows are no more about the Soviet Union or socialism than King Lear is about King Lear.

    • sailorfish [she/her]
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      4 years ago

      The Chernobyl miniseries is great. I watched it with my dad (he was born in the USSR, I'm from post-Soviet Ukraine). We had a lot of fun marvelling at how Slavic most of the actors looked. He made me look up three times that the actress playing Lyudmila wasn't actually Russian 😂 The props and setting were really good too! Some moments we laughed at ofc but overall it was fantastic.

      Also sidenote - I really appreciate both Death of Stalin and Chernobyl letting the actors keep their accents. None of this fake Russian "My name Ivan" bullshit. I'd like all movies to go that way - nobody expects movies about ancient Rome to go "It's a meee, a Juuulius." Give the rest of us the same dignity lmao

      • shakyamuni [none/use name]
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        4 years ago

        Kubrick's Paths of Glory is great on this.

        Imagine if Shakespeare were performed in the regional dialects of the setting. Although maybe the true mystic of power of Hamlet has yet to be unlocked by incomprehensible Danish accents.

    • mao [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      deleted by creator

      • JudgeJuche [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        It was critical of the USSR. In the first episode, just before cutting the phone lines to the city, the mayor of Pripyat gives a hilarious "bad guy" speech about the need to do evil in the name of Lenin. And in the last episode, Legasov extols on the superiority of the West in a grand speech that was entirely fictionalized. At several points it also depicts Soviet people as slaves operating under the constant threat of execution (e.g. Legasov on the helicopter and the miners).