Fire

Forest fires break out in the Moscow region and the aerial firefighting base goes on rotation. Experienced men are short, and the team leader Andrey Pavlovich has to take on a new one, Roman. The fire grows, the wind turns, and the crew loses its own way out. Alexey Nuzhnyy directs. Konstantin Khabenskiy plays Andrey Pavlovich, with Andrey Smolyakov, Irina Gorbacheva and Ivan Yankovsky in the cast. It is one of the later examples of the Russian disaster film. After the twenty tens the genre became a strong commercial shape in Russia and the films are generally made at large technical scale. The fire sequences were worked mostly on location and with practical effects, and that is the film's strongest side. Its subject is the work of the crews who parachute into fires; in Russia that is a separate service, and the film shows it in detail. The character strands stay inside the type: a team leader near retirement, his daughter, an inexperienced young man and the friction between them. The narrative runs these without surprise. Who it is for: viewers who like disaster films and large scale action production. Who it is not for: the script is predictable, the emotional scenes are written thickly, and the characters do not step outside the genre's mould.