Matt Reeves, the director of Cloverfield and the recently-wrapped The Batman, is producing an American remake of the sci-fi creature feature, Sputnik. The recently-released Russian flick had its international premiere at last year's Tribeca Film Festival and was released overseas in Russia in April 2020.
Sputnik is the directorial debut of Russian filmmaker, Egor Abramenko. The Cold War space thriller is set in the year 1983 and follows a cosmonaut named Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov) who, after crash landing back to earth, has no recollection of the events that caused the descent that left one teammate dead, another in a coma, and him without knowledge of what transpired during their mission in space. The movie goes through some familiar Alien-style motions as it's soon revealed that Konstantin has a killer extraterrestrial parasite living inside his body.
Receiving the American makeover, Deadline reports that the English version of Sputnik will be overseen by Matt Reeves's production company, 6th & Idaho, along with Village Roadshow Pictures and XYZ Films. With titles like The Batman, Joker, and Mandy, which are respectively connected to the companies coming together for this new venture, the creative possibilities are truly exciting. Fedor Bondarchuk, a big-name producer in Russia and actor featured in the original title, spoke about the project saying:
Sputnik was the first big Russian release to go straight to digital platforms during the lockdown, everyone was staying at home and an unprecedented amount of people watched it, the release created a lot of buzz both in Russia and globally. I’m very proud that Sputnik now is a rare Russian film to get an English language remake.
Reviews of Sputnik highlighted a familiar aesthetic to Ridley Scott's Alien franchise. When considering the plot of the movie, those comparisons should be expected. From a production perspective, it's notable that, as a first-time director, and with a minimal $2-million-dollar budget, Abramenko was able to pull off a piece of work that achieves a similar tone and feel reminiscent of its influential predecessors.
If there's any question that people still yearn for smart science fiction thrillers, all one has to do is look to HBO Max's groundbreaking series, Raised by Wolves to see that interest is still there. And new, exciting, thought-provoking ideas are still being born from the genre. With Reeves and company putting their heads together with the goal of building off the foundation created in the Russian film, one can only speculate that the new Sputnik will deliver the alien terror audiences are hungry for.
Source: Deadline