After a worldwide catastrophic event wipes out all of humanity bar a small section of eastern Europe known as “The Circle of Life”, a team of Russian soldiers must venture into the quarantine zone to discover what happened in Russia’s latest foray in the action sci-fi genre, The Blackout.

In recent years we have seen plenty of our eastern European compatriots up their game when it comes to film; Russia themselves have treated us to the likes of Why Don’t You Just Die!, Attraction and the exceptional Sputnik to name a few. In terms of The Blackout, it shows once again that they have great potential to create a special film, although that flawless recipe hasn’t quite been discovered just yet.

The narrative follows the story of two different soldiers Oleg (Chadov) and Yuriy (Fyodorov) whose paths cross at various points in the runtime as what is left of the world’s military sends teams deep into uncharted territory to find out how and why the population was suddenly wiped out. For the first half of the film it feels very cut and paste with other military action films, albeit with some commendable special effects considering its budget compared to a Hollywood blockbuster, and at times it’s a little top heavy. It’s only in the second half when there is a revelation that the film began to pique our interest as they tried something fairly unique in the sci-fi sub genre – it’s just a shame that the journey to this interesting narrative took over an hour to get there.

A solid sci-fi action film from Russia that proves that they have good ideas but haven’t quite perfected the formula just yet with a clunky first two acts.

Release Date: 28th December 2020 (VOD), Jan 20th (DVD)