Crew
Director – Aleksandr Boguslavskiy, Screenplay – Sergey Kaluzhanov, Photography – Anatoliy Simchenko & Kirill Zotkin, Music – Ryan Otter, Visual Effects – CJ, Art Direction – Irina Grajdankina. Production Company – Digitera, Ltd.
Cast
Viktor Dobronravov (Ethan Blake), Sonya Priss (Tina Morozova), Egor Koreshkov (Jacob Blake), Egor Beroev (Professor Henry Blake), Andrey Jigalov (Rob), Daniel Barnes (Ryan), Nikita Tarasov (Ted), Valeria Shkirando (Eve Adams)
Plot
Tech entrepreneur Ethan Blake premieres a new advanced plane that is powered by quantanium energy. However, on their maiden flight, the plane loses power and they are forced to put down on an island. People there steal the supply of quantanium, leaving them no way to get off the island. Exploring, Ethan discovers a set of ruins. However, fogs come and he find that he is back in 1986, the time when his father Henry was supervising the experiments that discovered quantanium. Caught between 1986, the present and a future 2036 where the quest for quantanium has ended in a war, Ethan realises that to prevent disaster he must go back to stop his father activating the original experiments.
In the late 2010s/2020s, Russian dark fantasy and science-fiction has become one of the most exciting new fields of fantastic cinema in the world. The Russians have been making a fascinating body of dark fantasy and sf/horror hybrids with the likes of The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead (2016), The Queen of Spades (2016), The Blackout (2019), The Ninth (2019), Baba Yaga, Terror of the Dark Forest (2020), Sputnik (2020) and The Superdeep (2020), among others. (See Russian Cinema).
I was disadvantaged in watching Forgotten Experiment in that the only copy I could find even after scouring the darkest corners on the internet was one that had been dubbed into English. And poorly too. It is always my preference to watch a foreign-language film in its original tongue with subtitles as that is the nearest one can get to experiencing it in its natural format. Alas, the dubbing done gives the characters Americanised names and where the dialogue does not always match what comes out of the actors’ mouths to distracting effect.
Forgotten Experiment is a Time Travel film. It deals with an island where an experiment has caused the time zone to move between 1986 and 2036 via mists and some handwave explanations. I was reminded quite a bit of the latter seasons of tv’s Lost (2004-10) where the people on the island kept flipping between time periods, where it became apparent that this was a giant temporal tapestry where events and aspects from one period ended up influencing or causing other things to happen.
A reasonable budget has been thrown at the film in terms of hardware and artillery. The plot gains a certain sophistication and modest complexity during its flipping between periods and some of the surprises that become apparent. More than that I cannot say as I think the film probably loses some of what it originally had due to the bad dubbing. Certainly, other films in the time travel genre do what we have here far better.
Trailer here