Near the end of Kraken, a 2025 Russian monster film about a submarine searching for a lost submarine under the Arctic ice, two brothers come up from the deep in a rescue vehicle. Before the younger one sailed, he was handed their father’s dive watch, which the older brother had forgotten to take with him. Now he offers it back. His brother tells him to keep it. He has earned it.
Nobody makes a joke. The film lets the moment be what it is: an inheritance passed down, and earned by doing one’s duty.
I have been watching Russian science fiction lately: Sputnik, The Blackout, Attraction, Invasion, and Kraken. Five films are not enough to judge a nation’s cinema, and none of these is a masterpiece. Some have plot holes, uneven pacing, and effects that do not quite hold up. But they share something American films have been losing, and it has taken a foreign industry to show me how much I miss it.
Anyone who has sat through an American blockbuster in the last fifteen years knows the move. Something terrible or wonderful happens. A city falls, a friend dies, a man does something brave. Before the moment can land, someone delivers a line that tells the audience not to take it seriously. Well, that just happened. Call it the Joss Whedon school of dialogue.
The quip is not just a habit of tone. It is a confession. A film that cannot let a sacrifice stand without a joke does not believe in sacrifice, and a film that must deconstruct every hero does not believe in heroes. Add the DEI casting checklist and the message that must be delivered whatever the story requires, and the result is a cinema embarrassed by the very things it used to celebrate.
The Russian films are not embarrassed by duty. Their men are competent, protective, and allowed to be brave without being made into buffoons. They have obligations to family, to comrades, and to country, and the films treat those obligations as the substance of a life rather than a cage to be escaped. The American hero discovers that society’s expectations are holding him back. The Russian hero discovers what he owes, and pays it.
Kraken is the plainest case. Because the mission is personal, an admiral is sent along with authority to take command, and he relieves the younger brother for pressing the search when the cautious choice is to turn for home. The brother presses on because his brother is down there. The film does not treat this as recklessness to be punished or sentiment to be mocked. It treats it as what a brother does.
The Blackout is darker and stranger. Its soldiers hold the last lit corner of Europe after the rest of the world goes dark, and when a being from beyond the stars offers to make himself humanity’s new god, one of them gives his life to stop him.
These are not naive films. Sputnik turns on an officer willing to feed prisoners to the creature in his laboratory, and no one watching is meant to admire him. Russian cinema knows that institutions can be corrupt and that men in uniform can do monstrous things.
But criticizing corrupt authority is not the same as treating authority itself as illegitimate. A flawed hero is not a mocked one. Questioning an institution is not the same as holding every inherited tradition in contempt. Hollywood has largely lost the ability to make those distinctions. These films have not.
There is darkness here, and plenty of it, but it does not become nihilism. The films see that the world is fallen without concluding that nothing in it deserves loyalty. Courage can simply be courage. Loyalty can simply be loyalty.
The obvious objection is that these are state films. Kraken lists the Cinema Fund and the state channel Russia-1 among its production companies, and it was shot inside a real Northern Fleet submarine with Northern Fleet sailors as extras. Attraction had the same two backers. Russia’s culture ministry has openly steered its film money toward military, patriotic, and historical subjects.
All true. It is also true of us. The Pentagon has kept an entertainment liaison office since 1948, and a producer who wants its aircraft carriers and helicopters submits his script for review. Act of Valor began when Naval Special Warfare invited production companies to pitch projects that would support SEAL recruiting, and the finished film put active-duty SEALs on the screen. When Top Gun: Maverick opened, Navy recruiters set up tables by the concession stands.
So the question of who paid settles nothing. Every nation that fields an army wants films that honor it, and every one finds a way to pay for them. The director of The Blackout, for his part, called his film anti-war and set it against Top Gun and Transformers. The only fair test is what is on the screen, and whether the film believes what it shows.
There is also a weight in these films that comes from somewhere. Russia’s Orthodox inheritance, the Soviet century, and a long history of invasion and wars for national survival have produced an outlook very different from America’s increasingly individualist popular culture. It is not my tradition, and it is not American Christian traditionalism. But it is a tradition, and the films carry it without apology.
I would rather watch an imperfect film that believes in heroism, loyalty, duty, and sacrifice than a polished one that mocks those virtues while lecturing me on its own moral superiority.
I grew up loving American movies. Some of my favorite films came out of Hollywood. But an industry embarrassed by its own inheritance is more interested in tearing things down than in understanding why they were valued in the first place, and these Russian films are a reminder that storytelling does not have to work that way.
Five films in, the biggest surprise is not how foreign they feel. It is how much they remind me of what I used to love about American movies.