Russian streaming platforms Kion and Okko are airing Klim Kozinsky’s new series Noon, based on Beetle in the Anthill, a novel by Soviet science fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The story belongs to their Noon Universe, a vision of a prosperous future in which humanity has achieved communism and made contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. But this utopian world is far from perfect: intelligence agencies still call the shots on Earth, and people have yet to learn to trust one another. Critic Anton Khitrov reviews the novel’s first screen adaptation.
Strugatsky adaptations are new cinematic fairy tales
The 2010s were a quiet decade for screen adaptations of the Strugatsky brothers’ work. Aleksei German’s long-gestating film Hard to Be a God came out in 2013, and only short films followed. Foreign directors and producers showed little interest in the Soviet science fiction writers. Television director Alan Taylor, known for his work on Game of Thrones and other projects, once set out to adapt Roadside Picnic, but could not sell the idea to producers. Russian film and television studios rarely tackled science fiction either: the genre is expensive and difficult to shoot, and audiences have grown accustomed to the production standards of Hollywood, HBO, and Netflix.
By the mid-2020s, though, the Strugatskys were enjoying a revival. The series Hard to Be a God ends on October 15. Noon, based on the novel Beetle in the Anthill, premiered two weeks earlier. The feature film Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, starring Yevgeny Tsyganov, is set to come out in January. At least one more series is in development: The Wish Machine, based on Roadside Picnic (Alan Taylor is not involved in this project).
The reason for this surge of interest remains unclear. There is no anniversary to mark, and the books have not entered the public domain. The various projects have different producers, and no single hit — like Cheburashka, which touched off a wave of imitators — appeared in theaters or on streaming services to set off a similar trend. Nor did the Strugatskys become noticeably more relevant in the 2020s than they were in the 2010s. The most plausible explanation is that production capacity has finally caught up with the demands of science fiction, and a familiar name in the credits lowers commercial risk.
Noon is a special case, though. Producer Danila Sharapov told Kinopoisk the project took 18 years to go from concept to premiere. If it succeeds, the team hopes to adapt other novels from the Noon Universe series as well.
The series director, Klim Kozinsky, has had an unconventional career. He studied theater directing under avant-garde director Boris Yukhananov at his Studio of Individual Directing and assisted international stars of experimental theater at the Electrotheatre Stanislavsky: Theodoros Terzopoulos and Romeo Castellucci. His film and stage work often engages with philosophical texts. In 2016 he staged Idiotologiya “Idiotology,” which combined Dostoevsky with Gottfried Leibniz, and in 2017 he released the animated film Tetragrammaton, whose characters included thinkers ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Like other students of Yukhananov — Dmitry Troitsky and Alexander Dulerain — he later moved into mainstream television.
Kozinsky made his first series, Mental, a dramedy about a con artist, together with Dulerain. He went on to release two more television projects: Clinic 13, a supernatural drama set in a hospital, and Pervyi nomer “Issue One,” a workplace drama about the glossy magazine industry based on a script by Sergei Minayev. Noon marks his debut in science fiction.
‘Noon’ reflects its time: in some ways, it’s a series about PTSD
Beetle in the Anthill was published in 1979. It carries noticeably less idealism than the Strugatskys’ earlier works from the era of Khrushchev’s Thaw, since it focuses on intelligence agencies that remain loyal to old methods — secrecy, control, and violence — even in a prosperous future society.
The novel’s narrator, Maxim Kammerer — familiar to readers from another Strugatskys novel, The Inhabited Island — works for COMCON-2, the main Earth intelligence agency of the 22nd century. The head of COMCON-2, the vigilant Rudolf Sikorsky, orders Kammerer to put a man named Lev Abalkin under surveillance. Abalkin had abandoned his post in space, apparently killed a colleague, and secretly returned to Earth, where he now rushes from place to place, tracking down old acquaintances and trying to uncover some kind of secret. Before deserting, Abalkin worked as a Progressor, infiltrating less advanced extraterrestrial civilizations to promote their development. His report on a mission to the planet Hope provides another storyline in the novel.
The best thing about Noon is its trio of lead characters. Like the creators of Hard to Be a God, the people behind Noon could not resist paying homage to Aleksei German, bringing in Leonid Yarmolnik, who played Don Rumata in German’s film. This time, instead of a brief cameo, Yarmolnik got a full-fledged role as the powerful Sikorsky. Yuri Kolokolnikov plays a restrained Kammerer, while Maxim Matveyev plays an expressive Abalkin. Preparing to portray a character who had served in hot spots in space, Matveyev studied material about people with PTSD, and his performance turned out to be unexpectedly topical. All three actors are convincing — which, unfortunately, cannot be said for either the supporting characters or the setting as a whole.
The series’ world lacks both originality and logic
Writing science fiction is, in a sense, undoubtedly easier than filming it. Take architecture: the Strugatskys did not need to specify what buildings looked like on a thriving future Earth or on the post-apocalyptic planet Hope. They exist in the story, but readers are free to imagine them however they like.
Architecture is nothing, though. The Strugatsky brothers introduced entire intelligent races into their plots without describing them in detail. The Tagorans, a fairly significant faction in the Noon Universe series, are a case in point: all readers know about their biology is that they once went through a larval stage in their development, until they fixed their own genes.
A screen adaptation is another matter. Filmmakers have to design everything, from the Museum of Extraterrestrial Cultures, where the key events of Beetle in the Anthill take place, to the Tagorans themselves. In its attempt to build a convincing world on screen, Noon falls short not only of contemporary Hollywood science fiction filmmakers like James Cameron or Denis Villeneuve but even of Georgy Daneliya’s low-budget Kin-dza-dza, in which the production designers built an entire alien civilization — a parodic one, but a complete one — out of scrap metal.
In Kozinsky’s series, the setting feels like an afterthought. The Moscow of the future consists of snow-white high-rises of impractical shapes topped with colossal statues (some locations were shot on site: the COMCON interior, for instance, is the Zilart museum, while the exterior is the Garage museum). The planet struck by catastrophe is a gray, rocky desert. The enemy base is a black, spiked pyramid. The aliens differ from humans mostly in the color and texture of their skin, much like in Star Trek — a classic, though one that first aired half a century ago. The future in Noon is so derivative and so shamelessly computer-generated that it is simply impossible to believe in it.
How a fictional world looks is, without question, a fundamental question for science fiction film. But how that world works matters just as much — and the series has problems there too.
Consider one example. Because Beetle in the Anthill is a novel about intelligence agencies and, more broadly, about access to information, the Strugatskys worked out in meticulous detail how secret operations at COMCON-2 function. The series discards nearly all of the rules the writers invented and offers none in their place.
In the novel, Kammerer searches for Abalkin alone, since Sikorsky does not trust the other agents, and questions witnesses by posing as a journalist. In the series, Kolokolnikov’s character works with an assistant and does not bother with any cover story. That is far from the most glaring breach of secrecy in the show; the most glaring one cannot be described without spoilers.
Breaking COMCON-2‘s own protocols would be one thing, but the creators sometimes dispense with basic human logic altogether. “If Abalkin shows up, let me know,” Kammerer asks a female witness, then leaves the room without giving her a business card or any way to reach him. “For the next lesson, prepare a report on the Wanderers,” a teacher tells the students before sending them home — apparently expecting everyone to turn up with the same report. The manager of the resort where Abalkin is staying sees through a window that Abalkin is armed and calls emergency services, but when he spots a woman entering Abalkin’s room, he hangs up with visible relief. “It’s good that woman showed up. She distracted him,” he later explains to Kammerer.
The characters in the series behave oddly and speak just as strangely. “By the way, what’s happening with my new petition to COMCON’s leadership about returning to Earth?” Abalkin presses his captain. One COMCON agent complains to a colleague: “He’s keeping secrets from you too? He’s in love with you!” Plot-relevant information is never dropped subtly; instead, it is spelled out in the middle of dialogue so the viewer never has to guess at anything. The Strugatskys, by contrast, held to the opposite principle, withholding explanations from the reader until the very end.
The creators of the adaptation got rid of the talking dogs. That was a mistake.
One of the visual effects creators behind The Avengers said in an interview that the film’s success depended largely on how believable Hulk turned out to be — the only one of the six lead characters who does not look human.
The same holds for the Beetle in the Anthill adaptation: it can be judged by how it portrays the golovan Shchekn, Lev Abalkin’s friend and partner in the novel.
In the novel’s terminology, golovans are a “cynoid race” — in plain terms, intelligent talking dogs that emerged on the planet Saraksh “as a result of radiation mutations.” As long as they stay silent, they look almost exactly like Earth dogs, apart from a somewhat larger head (hence the name) and less expressive facial movements, which makes it hard for humans to read their thoughts.
There are plenty of ways to portray a talking dog on screen: a puppet, makeup, CGI, or an actual trained dog. The creators of the series rejected all of them. A dog-headed humanoid, makeup artist Irina Leshko explained in an interview, would come across as a character from either a fairy tale or a horror film. So the golovans in the series became a humanoid race, and creating Shchekn required no CGI, just makeup — excellent makeup, it should be said. But something essential was lost along the way.
Golovans don’t simply appear in the novel because it is space science fiction, a genre that more or less requires aliens. For the Strugatskys, they are strange, unpredictable creatures, fundamentally incomprehensible, onto whom humans project their own notions of intelligence and culture. Golovans have no folklore of their own, for instance, but enterprising humans have learned to fake it, since people readily believe that talking dogs must have created their own epic — something like the Kalevala or the Elder Edda.
This is an important motif in the novel: people tend to judge everyone by themselves. Confronted with the mysterious, superior civilization of the Wanderers, Earth’s leaders suspect they are dealing with colonizers — a conclusion shaped by humanity’s own history.
The only character in Beetle in the Anthill capable of friendship with another form of intelligence is Lev Abalkin, the first Earthling to go on a space mission with a golovan partner. It is no accident that, as a child, he dreamed of becoming a zoopsychologist rather than a Progressor — that specialty was forced on him. The Strugatskys’ Abalkin is an outsider, drawn to everything nonhuman because he finds no understanding among people. His caretakers and superiors make clear that the limitations of the human mind show up not only in dealings with aliens but in interactions with fellow humans as well.
In short, Shchekn’s canine appearance is not just a matter of design: the uniquely close relationship between Lev Abalkin and a creature utterly unlike him is, in a sense, the key to the entire novel.
In the series, all of this subtext is lost. Kozinsky’s Shchekn is essentially just a person with an unusual appearance. The director cast Black actor Nikita Tau Naledi in the role, apparently deciding his look was “alien” enough. Judging by the white dreadlocks the golovan wears, the creators of the series seem to see no real difference between African cultures and extraterrestrial ones.
The Shchekn of the screen adaptation is not the haughty, stubborn creature with mysterious motives from the book. He is a loyal friend and an artless truth-teller, not especially civilized but good-natured by nature. Literary scholars call this archetype the “noble savage” (the best-known example being Friday from Robinson Crusoe). The irony is hard to miss: for once, a Black actor plays a major role in a prominent Russian series, yet the team behind the project has nothing to offer him beyond an outdated colonial trope.
The creators were afraid of being accused of an inaccurate adaptation. But inaccuracy isn’t the problem.
What makes Noon unique is the disclaimer that opens every episode — a rare case of a project all but begging the source material’s fan base for mercy. “The series’ plot does not match the original text by the authors,” the creators warn, “but it was developed with respect for the original work of these great Soviet writers.”
Strugatsky fans are, to put it mildly, a demanding audience. But the problem with both new adaptations — Noon and Hard to Be a God alike — is not deviation from the text. Adapting half-century-old science fiction without taking some liberties is impossible; the Strugatskys, for instance, never imagined smartphones, and their 22nd-century videophone is so bulky it has to be “dragged,” not carried, from room to room. The real problem is simplification standing in for interpretation: the setting is simpler, the dialogue is simpler, the meanings are simpler.
The Strugatskys are being flattened into an average, Western-style work of contemporary science fiction. Noon calls Moscow the center of humanity, and the entire Earth, according to the creators’ concept, speaks Russian. No explanation is offered for why, but the premise alone apparently qualifies the project as patriotic science fiction — it is not for nothing that the Internet Development Institute backed both new Strugatsky adaptations. Genuine patriotism, if it really was called for, would have meant trying to create something original and worthy of the source material, rather than turning it into Star Trek.
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Anton Khitrov