Hollywood may lead you to believe that all extraterrestrial invasions, supernatural attacks, and supervillain assaults occur in the United States. However, the aliens enjoy a change of scenery now and then, and what better location to visit than the first country with which the US had a Cold War? The aliens traveled all the way to Russia this time.
Fyodor Bondarchuk directed the Russian films Attraction and Invasion, which were released in 2017 and 2020, respectively. They are an intriguing mix of science fiction and action, with a little romance between the female protagonist and a Sentient creature thrown in for good measure. Irina Starshenbaum, Alexander Petrov, Oleg Menshikov, and Renal Mukhametov star in the film Attraction, while Sergei Garmash joins the ensemble in the sequel.
What you may not know is that Bondarchuk, the director, has pitched the film as a social allegory, since it was inspired by the 2013 Biryulyovo riots, in which a 25-year-old Russian man was allegedly slain by a Central Asian migrant. The Russian government then placed a bounty on the perpetrator’s head, and the public, predictably, rose up against him.
You may be familiar with science-fiction romances in which a human falls in love with a robot or an alien (Alexa, play E.T. by Katy Perry featuring Kanye West).
Attraction and Invasion follow the same path, however, if you believe it is just another generic sci-fi plot, I am here to explain to you how both films are not your average sci-fi. And it is for this reason that we have this video.
The Love Story Of An Earthly Human And A Hyper-Advanced Alien
The first movie, Attraction, introduces high school student Yulia. She has a best friend, a boyfriend named Artyom, and her father Colonel Valentin Lebedev is in charge of the military operation in Russia.
One day, a spaceship nears Earth’s orbit and infiltrates it. The military defense in Russia detects it and thinks of it as a NATO spacecraft. They try to stop it with missiles, causing it to crash on Earth and destroying everything in its way. Yulia’s best friend dies in the process.
The Colonel goes near the spaceship and comes face-to-face with an alien that looks like a robot. After interrogating it, the Colonel realizes that it’s not here to fight. It just wants to fix its spaceship and leave.
This is followed by a nationwide curfew in Russia. Yulia is resentful towards the alien because her best friend died, so, she steals her dad’s gun and teams up with Artyom’s gang to get to the alien. At night, they get to the spot where the alien allegedly was and find some weird, alien technology.
Yulia comes face to face with the alien while in her best friend’s room and slips off the debris but the thing saves her. Artyom and the others see this and attack the alien to save her. The alien falls off several stories and the others rush downstairs. They realize that it is just armor but Artyom gets his hands on some blood. Yulia looks sideways and sees someone but doesn’t say anything out of fear. They retrieve the armor to prevent army patrols from finding them and evacuate the place.
On another day, she sneaks into the crash site and finds the severely wounded alien. She brings him home and contacts her nerdy friend Google, asking him about tips to salvage the situation. She donates her blood to help him survive. While examining his body, she notices a wristband but it wraps itself around her. Later, Yulia finds out that the wristband can manipulate water.
The alien looks exactly like a human and speaks Russian (okay but how?). His name is Hakon and he tells Yulia about him looking for a device called ‘Shilk’ because that’s what lets him travel through space safely, without destroying his body.
Meanwhile, scientists at the military facility are examining the ‘Shilk’ which was retrieved by Artyom’s gang and they realise that the water has been behaving weirdly. This is because Hakon’s spaceship was using the water to fix itself.
Hakon goes out to look for the ‘Shilk’ but his awkward behavior makes the police mistake him for a druggie and he is sent to the cops for an interrogation.
Artyom and his friend experiment on the alien armor and realize that it has quite some unique properties. They try to inform Colonel Lebedev about it but are stopped in the middle of the road due to a riot for water as the spaceship was absorbing everything. They provoke the crowds rioting even more and Artyom is finally stopped thanks to a policeman who hits him with a baton. He is then taken to the police station, where Hakon is already present.
Yulia goes to the station to get the ‘Shilk’ from her father and makes up a story of being pregnant with Hakon’s child to get him out of the place. Artyom also forgets to tell the Colonel about the armor. She helps Hakon disguise himself as a scientist and he uses the guise to infiltrate into the room and take the ‘Shilk’ from the container. After a while, the people in the room realise that it had been infiltrated and send out a red alert.
Yulia and Hakon evacuate the place and go back to her house but they see on TV that they were ‘wanted’ as criminals. Yulia then takes Hakon into a club because the military wouldn’t check the club for a situation like this. The both of them dance and through a simulation, Hakon tells her the truth about his arrival and his home planet. He also tells her that if the military tried to force themselves into the ship, it would destroy itself and with that, everything around its radius.
Artyom’s friend sees the two together and informs him about it. He calls her and she confesses her feelings about Hakon to him so Artyom and his friend charge at Hakon. Hakon fights back and Artyom’s friend shoots him, but the bullet hits his friend Ruslan instead. Devastated, Artyom makes this news go viral to form a group to attack the spaceship.
The group breaks through a police barricade and suited armors come out to fight the mob. Yulia and Hakon are in an armored car, trying to return ‘Shilk’ to the ship while evading Artyom who gets into Hakon’s suit and attacks him. However, Hakon takes Artyom down. Enraged, he uses a rifle to shoot the both of them. Colonel Lebedev sees his daughter in a mortal state but the suits state that their extraterrestrial technology can save her. The Colonel enters the ship with Hakon and a dying Yulia while the ship uses water to heal her. He interrogates the ship which talks about Hakon’s mission to observe earth and its war-torn history. However, Yulia’s love has changed their mind about the planet’s ruthlessness.
In the end, everyone goes back to their daily lives and Hakon leaves in his spaceship. Artyom is arrested.
The sequel, Invasion, takes place two years after the events of Attraction.
Russia has strengthened their defenses by a lot so that they can handle further alien invasions. And Colonel Lebedev is at the helm of it all.
Some pod-like technology is launched from Hakon’s ship from Attraction and it enters the Earth’s stratosphere, crashing into a water body in Russia.
Yulia is in college now and she is accompanied by a bodyguard all the time. The colonel picks her up and takes her to a top-secret location. When Yulia reaches there, she sees that the defense was conducting experiments on the alien armor from Attraction. However, that was not the reason why Lebenov got Yulia.
The military conducts experiments on Yulia to test her water-controlling bracelet. She is made to answer questions about Artyom shooting her and Hakon to monitor the water’s reaction to her negative emotions. To make things worse, Artyom is brought out of his cell to agitate her.
Yulia reacts negatively to it and the water starts behaving abnormally. Things go out of control and the colonel retrieves her. He assigns a new guard, Ivan, to protect her.
One night, while at a bar, Yulia suddenly sees Hakon. He gets into a fight with Ivan and takes Yulia away. He then contacts his spaceship, which is even cooler and more high-tech now and can hack into any earthly electronic device. They hack into a nearby BMW and escape. Ivan is unable to catch up and finds out that Hakon is back.
Hakon and Yulia go to a small house in the woods where Hakon is trying to live as a human, and has a job. Turns out, the pod in the beginning was Hakon’s and he was in space for only a week but that was two years on Earth.
In space, a much bigger spaceship narrows in on Hakon’s and integrates it into itself. Yulia tells her dad on call that she is happy wherever she is. The colonel asks his team to track her location but not take any violent action. The military finds her and Lebedev orders them to not fire but the audio frequencies get distorted into asking them to kill Yulia and Hakon.
This happens because the bigger ship (Ra) makes Hakon’s ship (Soul) hack into the systems and send the message. The military opens fire on Yulia and Hakon and they escape into his pod but she gets shot, again.
Meanwhile, Artyom escapes while being transferred and gets into Hakon’s old suit. It then chases Hakon’s pod which is being chased by choppers and offers to help them. Hakon goes to get a lot of water to heal Yulia. He tells Artyom about Ra’ objective to kill Yulia because she had the bracelet and they did not want their technology to get to Earth.
Ra makes a fake video of Yulia speaking against the military for stealing alien technology and makes it go viral. Everyone around Russia get fake phone calls of being ordered to kill Yulia to save their family.
Hakon heals Yulia with water and tells Artyom that her body is changing from being human. He also tells him that Ra, being an AI, has no personal objective and instead, works on a programmed protocol, according to which, Yulia is a threat that has to be exterminated for having the bracelet.
The military switches to analog gear after realising that the attack is a cyber one. Artyom and Google team up to take Hakon down to save themselves. They take Hakon to the colonel who is adamant on attacking Ra, even though Hakon tells him that the Ra will destroy them easily.
Ivan tells Yulia that he will kill her if something happens to his son (fake call threats, remember?) while Artyom tells Hakon that he still loves Yulia.
The Russian defense launches missiles at the Ra and it hits the mark. They think that they have destroyed it. Meanwhile, the citizens are rioting on the streets to have Yulia killed but Ivan protects her. But, he resigned right after that.
Ra contacts Hakon and asks him to kill Yulia and return to his home planet. The military realises that they failed at exterminating it. Hakon denies so the ship comes to Earth and uses up all the water around it. Everything within the ship’s 3 km radius gets overwhelmed by water. Hakon lets Artyom and Yulia escape and meets up with the colonel to tell him his plan of action.
Hakon makes a plan to use his pod to infiltrate the Ra, using the water pressure for speed, ultimately destroying the Ra with the force of water. But this was a suicide mission.
Yulia’s helicopter crashes and she realizes that the only way to fix this situation is if she dies so she tells the crowd that she is Yulia. Artyom tries to protect her but Ivan, thinking that she killed his son, shoots her. Artyom retrieves the bullet and dies.
She uses her bracelet to make tornadoes in the water and begins to crush the Ra. The military fires at it from above and they ultimately destroy it. Hakon is safe as well.
Few days later, the colonel fakes Yulia’s death to save her from the wrath of the citizens while she leaves with Hakon for his home planet.
Review
The attraction was received very well by the critics. Compared to that, Invasion did not make that great of an impact. However, from a personal point of view, I think both sci-fi films were brilliant. As I’ve already said before, it’s not a cookie-cutter sci-fi/alien plot. And the romantic elements do not feel forced or rushed at all.
The characters are interesting and the antagonization of the protagonist by the Russian citizens takes the movies to another level. This is where it ties up to the Biryulyovo riots where the people revolted against an immigrant (in this case, Hakon, followed by Yulia who was gradually turning into an alien due to her bracelet). Artyom also has a redemption arc which adds more depth to his character.
One of the standout parts of the movies would definitely be the VFX. The alien ship, the scenes involving the water, and the armored robots were executed brilliantly and meshed in with its realistic surroundings seamlessly.
I wonder what Hakon and Yulia spoke about though. Pretty sure they have very different likes and dislikes. It would be a bummer if they broke up while she is away from her planet.
The Origin of Hakon
Hakon is an alien who comes from a technologically advanced planet that is far superior compared to Earth. However, instead of looking like an extraterrestrial species altogether, he looks just like humans, which is weird considering the climate, temperature, and gravitational pull in a different planet would be completely different but hey, this is fiction.
He lands on Earth after his spaceship gets damaged by a meteor shower as he was traveling through the Solar System.
He is also genetically superior, as pointed out by Google when Hakon picks up a few Russian words from Google and Yulia’s conversation and begins to speak in Russian himself. He still doesn’t get the quirks of the language though.
He also acts quite strange in the beginning, especially when he sees water at the garage where he had his first interaction with Yulia and Google. He also happens to be quite straightforward, as is seen when Google tells him that Yulia was grateful to Hakon for having saved her and he should return the favor. However, Hakon points out that Yulia was visibly flustered because she had saved the enemy and wondered if she was in trouble, so a ‘thank you’ would not make things okay for her.
Being genetically superior and coming from a separate planet did not make him robotic or heartless though. This is a love story after all. As Hakon falls in love with Yulia, he begins to prioritize her over everything else, going the extra mile by putting his life and safety for her. She, of course, does the same for him.
In Invasion, when the Ra asked him to kill her and return to his planet, he denied and instead, volunteered to execute a plan that would cause him to die while defeating the Ra. With this, Hakon was the ultimate token of self-sacrifice.
What was Hakon’s home planet like?
During the scene in Attraction where Yulia takes Hakon to a club, he tells her about his home planet. He explains how he had no intentions of landing on Earth and it was an accident due to the meteor shower that caused a system failure in his ship.
He tells her about the dangers of the military trying to destroy or infiltrate the ship because the AI – Soul, would destroy the ship and with it, everything around it. This is because the technology in Hakon’s home planet is highly advanced so they did not want it to fall into the hands of others. Neither did they take technology from anyone and nor did they give it.
This is also what sets Invasion into motion as Ra wants Yulia killed for possessing Hakon’s bracelet.
What is Hakon’s spaceship-like?
The spaceship Hakon travels in looks like a huge eye and it has elliptical wheels orbiting around it, like Saturn, but much more hardcore. The ship is controlled by an AI called Soul and it is ridiculously advanced.
Its upgrades get even better in the sequel, Invasion, where it learns the algorithm of Earth’s technology and can hack into any device. A horrible technology if it fell into the wrong hands but once again, humans cannot infiltrate it so the system is quite foolproof.
Are there any plot holes in the movies?
Attraction 2017 has some very obvious plot holes. It is understandable that they exist for the sake of moving the plot forward but it is still an interesting thing to pick up on.
After the arrival of the spaceship, a curfew is imposed all over Russia. However, Yulia’s school remains open which is weird.
This is also apparent in the scene when Yulia takes Hakon to the club. How is a club functioning during a nationwide curfew? Maybe it was illegally open and that’s why Yulia took Hakon there, hoping that the military would not come because they weren’t aware of its hours.
Another glaring plot hole becomes apparent during the scene where Yulia gives Hakon blood to save him. Normally, you cannot donate blood just like that. The blood type needs to match. I reckon aliens are not out there having blood types similar to that of humans. Or maybe Yulia’s blood type is O+. It’s called a ‘universal’ donor after all. Maybe people with this blood type can donate to any species in the Universe.
Another not so obvious one would be Yulia’s reaction to the death of her best friend Svetlana. She initially begins to take action against Hakon because she was devastated after Svetlana’s death and wanted to do right by her. However, as the movie progressed, it feels like she has completely forgotten about her initial objective and does not even mention it.
Having broken the meme-stereotype of aliens only attacking the USA, Bondarchuk has rounded Attraction and Invasion to be brilliant movies that are not only entertaining for a casual watch but have substantial depth and substance, be it with reference to the performance of the actors, the VFX, the extraterrestrial elements, or the emotional value.