Millennials vs. Nazis: A Love Story
Both The Fog and We Are from The Future are premised on the breakdown of transhistorical empathy, due to the current young generation's lack of historical consciousness. The protagonists of The Fog and its sequel are a small group of Russian soldiers who are by no means bad people. To the contrary, they are almost relentlessly ordinary. True, one of them seems to be a born leader, while another, nicknamed "Yandex" after the popular Russian search engine, is the resident brainiac whose endless font of knowledge will be crucial to them when they find themselves on the front lines.
Their story unfolds according to the logic of allegory, with their movements in space and time doubling as a representation of their moral development. Before they travel in time, they take part in a training exercise requiring them to hike across a vast terrain. Instead, they choose a short cut, and when they are lost and in danger of missing their deadline, they actually seize a bus full of World War II veterans who are on their way to a commemoration. In their desire to cut corners, they disgrace not only themselves, but the men who came before them (now, briefly, their prisoners). The punishment imposed on them by their commander pales in comparison to the punishment inflicted on them by karma: when they march through a thick fog, they end up in World War II.
Once they arrive, the plot plods ahead with an uninspired predictability that nevertheless reinforces the overall sense of historical inevitability. After an initial period of confusion, the young men throw in with the Red Army and fight the German invaders. Their twenty-first-century cynicism is replaced by a 1940s sense of Purpose. Though they have no idea if they can ever make it back to their home time, they realize that part of their mission has to be to make sure that the futuristic weaponry they have brought with them does not remain in Nazi hands, or else they will have inadvertently changed the course of the war. In the last episode of the first season, several of them die heroically, only to be miraculously resurrected when the the whole group has returned back to their proper time. They have arrived at precisely the right moment to watch the victory parade, with special attention to the proud veterans whom they had so deeply offended in the first episode. The camera pans across the faces of our heroes as they try in vain to restrain the tears that well up in their eyes. [1]
We Are from the Future teaches similar lessons, but from a different point of departure. [2] The film's four protagonists have much further to go in order to redeem themselves. Rather than soldiers, they are unscrupulous treasure hunters who comb World War II battle sites in search of medals and memorabilia. [3] They are led by Sergei Filatov, a former St. Petersburg University history student whose nickname ("Borman") refers to a top official in Hitler's Reich, and among their ranks is a neo-Nazi skinhead called "Skull" ("Cherep") who has a swastika tattoo on his shoulder. Where the heroes of The Fog are merely jaded and disrespectful, the men in We Are from the Future start out as repulsively cynical.
At a dig outside of St. Petersburg, they are approached by an old woman who lost her son at this site during the war. She begs him to find his silver cigar case; humoring her. They humor her and promise to give it back to her if they come across it, even though they have no intention of doing so. Inside a dugout, they stumble across a set of military IDs with their names and photos on them, a shock that convinces them they must be on drugs. Naturally, they run to skinny dip in a nearby lake in order to sober up, but once they are in the water, they find themselves back in 1942.
Naked but still in possession of the mysterious ID papers they found in the dugout, the men are presumed shell-shocked and incorporated into a local Soviet military unit. Slowly they become part of the team, though taking part in actual warfare is still a shock. Along the way, they meet an orderly named Nina with whom Borman falls in love. They even stumble upon Sokolov, the old lady's lost son and possessor of the mysterious silver cigar case. A dying Sokolov asks them to take his cigar case and bring it to his mother.
By the end, our heroes have become thoroughly dedicated to the Soviet cause; Nina is presumed dead; one of the men is mortally wounded, and all four go back to the lake, this time successfully returning to the present. The wounded man is miraculously healed, but that is only an external manifestation of the changes to their hearts. The film ends with Skull trying to scrape the swastika tattoo off his skin.
Their moral transformation is now complete--so complete, in fact, that in the sequel Skull has grown his hair out, and Borman is played by an entirely different actor (the other two members of the original group are absent). All the same, We're From the Future 2 actually adds to the franchise's message, unlike the sequel to The Fog, which simply sends the guys back again for another iteration of the premise.[4] Borman and Skull have completely turned their lives around, becoming real archeologists rather than unscrupulous treasure hunters. Their official work is doubled in the film by their newfound moral purpose: they will teach other cynical young men that the Soviet victory is sacred.
In the first film, our heroes had to overcome their own immaturity and lack of respect, but now, they have a more complicated task: combatting the forces of Russophobia and Ukrainian nationalism that would not only complicate the narrative of the war as pure good vs pure evil, but resurrect pro-Nazi sentiment as part of the Ukrainian nation-building project. The film came out in 2010, three years before the Euromaidan protests and four before the outbreak of armed conflict, but five years after the Orange Revolution in Kyiv unleashed growing anti-Ukrainian sentiment in the Russian state media. Borman and Skull are supposed to take part in a reenactment of the 1944 "Brody Cauldron" battle that was key to the Red army offensive against the Germans. Appalled at the local Ukrainians enthusiasm for Nazi regalia and their hostility towards all things Russian, they try to make the best of things. But they quickly find themselves the object of ridicule on the part of two young Ukrainian men, the nationalist Taras and his friend Seryi (the pampered son of a Ukrainian parliamentarian). As a prank, Taras and Seryi throw an old World War II bomb into the ruins where Borman and Skull are standing, assuming it is a dud. The bomb goes off, sending all four men back to 1944.
We Are from the Future is a dutiful sequel in terms of both plot and theme. Now it is Taras and Seryi who have to learn the lesson that the Russian heroes mastered in the previous film, while Borman and Skull continue the soap opera plot half-heartedly developed during their previous journey. Confronted by the villainous Ukrainians who fought on the side of the Nazis, they refuse to take part in the fascists' slaughter of innocent villagers. By the time they are back in the present, they have completely internalized the cult of the Soviet Victory, while also experiencing an object lesson in the virtues of solidarity between Russians and Ukrainians.
Meanwhile, the Russians discover that Borman’s beloved Nina is not dead, but in her ninth month of pregnancy by her soldier husband. Nina gives birth, but she and her husband heroically die during a bombing, leaving the now-penitent Taras to save their baby. Borman will nonetheless find happiness upon his return to the present, when he meets NIna's granddaughter, who looks exactly like her. It's a cheap twist, but a consistent one: only by dedicating himself to the motherland's heroic history can he create for himself a happy future, making the present and the future into felicitous iterations of the past.
Were it not for the simplicity of the film's ideological message and the studio's commitment to straightforward entertainment , this sequel could have pushed the franchise in a more self-aware, reflective direction. Its iterative function ("We Are from the Future II!"), its pointed references to post-Soviet disunity, and in particular the choice of twenty-first century setting all point back to a contemporary Russian preoccupation with the reframing of history. In the first film, the protagonists are on a mission to loot the past; their transformation involves the recognition of the primacy of sentimental and historical value over the potential economic rewards of cashing in on World War II artifacts. In the second, we move from archeological dig to historical reenactment, from grave-robbing to voluntarist resurrection.
In a historical reenactment (or "reconstruction," the Russian term for it), contemporary participants strive for verisimilitude as they simulate a historic battle while obviously aware that they have not traveled in time. The Time Crashers of We Are from the Future 2, having just been transported from a reenactment, are initially unable to recognize the real thing, mistaking it for the deliberate, ludic fraud they have just left. Verisimilitude is not enough; they must experience actual danger to know that they are far from the realm of play. And yet, have they really stopped playing? We see them suffer, we see the danger, but they will, of course, survive. Time Crashing, like historical reenactments, requires a compromise between seriousness and gaming. In each case, the young men involved are using the past to either learn about or remind themselves of the solemnity of the Victory, but even as they are led to identify with the combatants in the Great Patriotic War, they remain aware that there is someplace outside the game (or the war) for them to return to.
Notes
[1] As for Season 2: they basically do it all over again. Television repeats itself, first as melodrama, then as a naked ratings grab.
[2] Not that these films are otherwise all that different from each other. As Ilya Kalinin puts it, "they are all basically the same film, and there is no need to talk about each one separately." Илья Калинин. "Future-in-the-past / Past-in-the-future: советское будущее постсоветского прошлого." Seans. May 14, 2013. https://seance.ru/articles/future_in_the_past/
[3] In Russian, such people are referred to as "chernye kopateli", which literally means "black diggers." In English, the film is occasionally entitled "Black Hunters," which would be unlikely to make sense to the uninitiated.
[4] In The Fog 2, the men accidentally cause the near-death of Mikhail Yegorov, the soldier who would go on to raise the Soviet flag over the Reichstag. They spend four episodes trying to undo this rather dubious damage; a brief appeal to the Butterfly Effect explains why this change in history is important, but it is worth noting that, at this point, what is at sake seems entirely symbolic. Given the tenor of World War II commemorations during the 2010s, this seems appropriate.