I watched Sputnik purely at the recommendation of FoundFlix, a personal favorite YouTube account who included it in his Top Horror Movies of 2020 review. I think the movie is a fresh take on the genre, the alien itself is interesting and terrifying, and it asks existential questions that can be investigated beyond the context of an alien symbiote (like I’m doing right now!!!). Spoiler alert: this write-up contains movie spoilers. Also, shoutout to my 2 subscribers, my husband Mike and my boss Karen ✌🏼
This write-up has gone through multiple iterations as I’ve wrestled with this question which I think Sputnik is posing to us:
What makes a hero?
First, I’d like to capture some #heroic qualities that I think are repeatedly embodied by heroes, whether real or animated:
Heroes are superhuman, even when they aren’t. They possess a greater resolve than the rest of us normies and so can take on challenges that the rest of us can’t, or don’t.
Heroes want to, or feel called to, make sacrifices for the greater good. They are not forced.
Heroes selflessly take on responsibility for huge challenges or injustices, and they are never resentful of the conditions that created it.
Sputnik offers us three versions of a hero:
Konstantin, the only surviving cosmonaut who also happens to be harboring a symbiotic alien in his throat. He’s a hero because he (presumably) breached a new frontier by going into space, and did it for the cultural and technical advancement of his country. His primary drive in Sputnik is a combination of self-preservation and duty — he desperately wants to survive and escape the facility so he can find and care for his orphaned son.
Colonel Semiradov, military big-man-in-charge who is leading the investigation of Konstantin and the alien. He’s a hero for two reasons: one, because he is serving his country by virtue of being in the military; two, because he is working on harnessing a new groundbreaking weapon that would further the global power of his country, via the alien inside Konstantin. His primary drive is achievement — he wants to understand the alien and how to control it, and he doesn’t really care about harm that occurs along the way.
Tatyana, the experimental young doctor who is called in to aide the research of Konstantin and the alien. She’s a hero for being committed to preserving human life in the face of competing outside forces, evidenced in her introduction (being reprimanded for using an experimental procedure to treat a teen boy’s psychogenic seizures) and her actions throughout the film. Her primary drive seems to be a sense of duty or empathy — she wants to save people, even when it looks impossible.
To become a hero necessitates a foe or challenge - you aren’t born a hero. Each of our heroes is grappling with their own motivating question: “How can I fulfill my paternal duty?”, “How can I harness this power?”, and “How can I save this life?”
At one point in the movie, Tatyana discovers that the military is feeding live humans to the alien — bound and gagged, they’re thrown into an enclosed pen and get their heads ripped off. The alien feeds off cortisol, the body’s stress and fear hormone, which adds a level of torture as the alien deliberately stokes intense fear in the target. Semiradov is the mastermind behind this feeding ritual, and when Tatyana confronts him and accuses the practice of being inhumane, Semiradov actually seems to laugh it off. These people are criminals, says Semiradov, they aren’t people. Semiradov is a hero; people who commit crimes are not. But, why?
While Sputnik is a Russian film, written and produced by Russians and acted by Russians, it still feels incredibly relatable and applicable to American politics and culture.1 Semiradov’s assessment of the people he has imprisoned as subhuman isn’t a particularly new idea — it’s a view shared by many of our neighbors, elders, and politicians. People commit crimes (a phrase that I don’t really agree with), sometimes heinous and violent ones, and so they don’t deserve the rights nor the livelihood that the rest of us enjoy (unless they’re white). The story Semiradov tells about one particular man who is being fed to the alien is undoubtably awful, but like with our US prison population, this story cannot be generalized across the entire community. We know that “criminals” in the US are often locked up for the crime of being poor — for attempting to live through poverty, homelessness, poor health, violence, or just because they couldn’t make bail. We know that folks in prisons are often just trying to survive, or to provide adequate support to their families — just like Konstantin, another of our heroes. Why is Konstantin a hero for his familial commitment, but not the prisoners? Why is this alien more deserving of life than they are?
I think the obvious answer is, there is no answer except our own biases, our own values and belief systems, and our own motivations. Semiradov’s motivation is to increase military power, and sacrifices must be made and rationalized to get there. But is that… heroic? Is that okay, that we arbitrarily make decisions about who lives or dies based on our own feelings and ideas? Our current prison system feels inextricable from our culture and country — this is how we’ve always done it. But, like Konstantin and the alien, shouldn’t we try? Couldn’t we take a page from Tatyana’s book, commit ourselves to protecting life instead of harnessing power, and imagine a better way? I think yes, and I know our neighbors are already doing it. And yes, maybe each will die without the other, maybe we can’t save it all — maybe we shouldn’t. After Konstantin and the alien are reunited, Konstantin shoots himself, killing them both, to protect the lives of everyone around him — including his child. This feels heroic. In the final scene of the film, Tatyana adopts his orphaned son. This feels heroic, too.
Maybe, to be a hero is just to be human, not superhuman. Maybe a hero doesn’t step up, but wades through the mire of their circumstances to find the right answer. Maybe a hero is critical of the conditions, is imaginative, is brave enough to try something new. Maybe heroes are all around us; maybe they are us; and maybe they’re curled up in our esophagus, waiting to emerge.
Thanks for reading! I obviously injected a lot of my own politics and understanding into this write-up, as we all do as we try to make sense of new things. I think there are a lot of different ways to approach this question and to approach this film overall, which I think is why I enjoyed it so much. Sputnik is available to stream on Hulu.
See you next time 👽
I would be remiss to not mention that during an American COVID-19 pandemic, heroes are often also healthcare workers. A hero is a nurse who works a 48 hour shift. A hero is the hospital worker that loads dead bodies into freezer trucks because there’s no more room in the morgue. We clap and bang pots for heroes every night at 7pm. We don’t give heroes more money or time off or public policy or personal protective equipment though, they’re heroes!