Don Dragon Rumata I Estorsky. Review of the series It’s Hard to Be a God.

Last week, the first season of the series Hard to Be a God came to an end. It started out as an “answer” to Dune, continued as an “answer” to Game of Thrones, and ended up as To Kill a Dragon. Naturally, when you try to snatch ideas from such vastly different works and transplant them into the setting of a famous story by a Russian classic, the result is… well, nothing comes of it except a patchwork quilt torn to shreds, occasionally resembling Indian cinema.

Instead of communism, there’s now something nobody can quite identify; I’d put my money on capitalism: from the dialogue, we learn that the heroes dream of careers and pay raises; they refer to their mission only as a “project,” and, to top it all off, there’s Rosatom advertising coming “out of every iron” and the “winding down of the project,” which, in fact, is not under any real threat.

Budakh is now an observer too, and Rumata’s father. He appeared mostly in Anton’s memories. His role on the planet is practically unknown.

They failed to convey the horror of what was happening on screen; worse yet, they crossed out the blacks, apparently afraid of offending the “feelings of believers.”

Too many abandoned arcs and unresolved threads. A heap of unnecessary characters. Too many quotes from the source material used in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

Rumata-Radoychich went from being an experienced observer who had risen to become head of the royal guard to a green rookie under the tutelage of Don Condor, who had “relocated” from Soan to Arkanar. The actor has absolutely no command of facial expression, walking around with a stone face throughout the entire series. He couldn’t even portray rage. Apparently, once they realized this, they replaced his face in some scenes with a first-person view featuring a rage indicator—as if we were in a video game. Only in the final minutes of the final episode did the director (Bondarchuk) finally force him to show some emotion—so he can do it after all, when he wants to!

Don Condor – Bezrukov became the main antagonist, perhaps even worse than Reba. He left behind such a sea of blood, including that of Earthlings, that he nearly caught up with Reba. He wanted, you see, to drag Arkanar into the modern world regardless of the cost. But even so, his bloodthirstiness is backed by nothing remotely rational.

The King – Yumatov played excellently, but the role itself was rather chaotic—the script jumped from one idea to another. It seemed as though there would be some kind of confrontation between the “statists” and the “boyars,” the new elite and the old one, but everything was abruptly cut off mid-sentence in episode 8.

Reba – Lavrov played wonderfully, but the script let him down: from a worthless pawn being advanced from the shadows, he suddenly became almost Cardinal Richelieu (or so it seemed until a certain point), only to blunder at the last moment. How plausible is a situation in which a cowardly, albeit not stupid, medieval man publicly kills a “god” who descended from the heavens on a “dragon”? We’ll leave that to the scriptwriters’ consciences.

Vaga became a complete nonentity; his disappearance from the film would have gone unnoticed. On the other hand, they “endowed” him with a mentally disabled son. Why? Personally, I didn’t understand.

Pampa (Kologrivyy) – I have no particular complaints about him, only about the director, who failed to turn him into a “Porthos” in terms of build, as he was in the book and as the series required too—swinging a two-handed sword for ages with the physique of a “beanpole”? I don’t buy it!

Arata was suddenly put in Vaga’s place by the scriptwriters, although his gang turned out to be something halfway between the “mafia” (or “thieves’ guild,” if you prefer) and peasants.

Uno (Rumata’s servant) and donna Okana acted well—her role was greatly expanded, although it’s also unclear why.

Personal anti-rating – Joan and Rob, the head of the space station and her deputy. The former gave the impression of someone’s mistress who had been put in charge of a major project through connections, while the latter was simply a man in the wrong place—he couldn’t make a single decision on his own. Special dishonorable mention goes to don Kuba—Bondarchuk—the role was created specifically to bring “His Majesty” onto the stage.

To sum up. The series not only fails to correspond to the book, which is more or less expected, but also failed to create a coherent work based on it. The impression is that the scriptwriters were bubbling over with ideas, while the director and his team either couldn’t or didn’t want to rein them in. The result was a mess. Perhaps they should have started by making a straightforward science-fiction action film inspired by the book, without rambling all over the place? And certainly, with a script like this, they had no right to call the series Hard to Be a God. They should have named it It Happened in Arkanar, The Chronicles of Arkanar, or The Arkanar Massacre—that would have been closer to the truth!