A film that was ahead of its time... in the sense that it went through production hell, cast replacements, reshoots, budget overruns, rewriting the script on the go at a time when it wasn’t fashionable yet. This is the kind of hat that DC superheroes do today, but the emergence of a situation in Soviet cinema that didn’t chase money and was a well-established state production machine is something very strange. Most writers did not believe in this film, it would have been on the shelf, if not for the accidental approval of Brezhnev.
On the minuses:
- Comrade Sukhov delights his wife with letters straight out of her head. He had no way to write them in the film and no one to send them through.
An imaginary scene with Eastern wives in a Russian village looks so incredibly ridiculous that it looks like a scene from Fools Village.
- Every "Vasily Ivanovich" should have his own stupid Petka. This one, for example, didn’t do anything meaningful except die.
- The film mentions the villain Javdet, but he is not featured in any scene. Why cram characters into the script that you can't or don't intend to show? It was possible to make Abdullah himself an enemy of Said, thus not to breed the essence and close the ending, but the author left the plot tail, not intending to ever shoot a sequel.
- In the middle of the film, the heroes mine the ship. Why? Where did they come from with such a visionary plan? What makes them think the bandits are going to sail this ship?
- The film has almost no plot. The Red Army is pursuing Abdullah...why? He left his wife, but he wanted them to die. But you came back for them? Why? Who were the three and a half old men sitting against the wall? Where did they get the dynamite box? Why does a customs officer who is no longer a customs officer still live in the desert? Wasn't he supposed to be taken to Russia when his state job came down? What's he eating in the desert, peacocks? How could his wife instantly find out that Sukhov had taken Abdullah prisoner and received a telepathic letter?
Most of the timekeeping – the characters just go somewhere in the desert, when in fact they are not going anywhere. Because the museum with the caretaker, and Vereshchagin’s house, and the ship, and the cistern are all within walking distance from each other, the characters run from one object to another in a few steps. I just didn’t understand the logic of moving in this film, because there is no distance.
- The movement of the characters’ lips in no scene coincides with the voiceover.
Based on all this, I don’t see any reason why this movie could become a cult movie. He was even initially filmed as just an action movie, as an allusion to Westerns, there are no deep messages in it, and the listed minuses on it do not leave a living place. The movie is banally boring. Fortunately, I’m not alone in my negative opinion – Wikipedia says that even at the time of release, the film was not liked by everyone, many called it the worst film of the year.