Salyut-7

A Russian film set in space in 1985. The Salyut 7 station is turning empty. Its crew left months ago and one day the station stops responding. There is alarm on the ground. A twenty-ton structure is spinning uncontrolled; its orbit cannot be adjusted and its fall cannot be predicted. A two-man crew is sent. The job will be done by hand rather than by system: docking with a rotating target. The docking is the film's centre. The automatic system does not work, the station turns slowly, and the commander lines the craft up by eye. They go inside. There is no heating; the walls are frozen over, the water is ice, it is dark and cold. From there the film is a repair. Turning the panels to the sun, getting current into the batteries, melting the ice, and bringing the systems up one at a time. A different calculation is being made on the ground. If the station is thought unsalvageable, recalling the crew and bringing the structure down comes onto the table. What the narrative is interested in is not exploration but repair: the film shows space not as a field of adventure but as time spent over a broken machine. A family line cuts in. The two men's lives on the ground enter the narrative, and those sections are its weakest. The effects work at scale. The zero gravity scenes were built with wires and rotating sets; the ice inside and the drifting water are the narrative's best images. The source is a real mission. Docking by hand with an abandoned station and repairing it in 1985 is counted among the hardest interventions in the history of spaceflight; the names and some events in the film are changed. Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Pavel Derevyanko and Aleksandr Samoylenko are in the cast. Klim Shipenko directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes technical space films and accounts of real missions. Who it is not for: anyone expecting documentary accuracy; the narrative exaggerates in a few places for tension and invents a crisis in the last section that did not happen.