Very simple movie. An uneducated machine gun inventor who dropped out of 7th grade develops his new weapons while competing against other Soviet designs. He has to use the teams he is given as this is USSR so you can't really set up your own company. Initially we see him getting injured in a tank in WW2. He is sent home, but instead he leaves the train and gets his own bench in a big plant. The workers there help him develop his gun in their free time. He then goes to Kazakhstan to work further on it and later to Moscow to work in a more professional setting and compete vs. Other gun designs. He loses as it's just a slab of metal. But the woman picked to draw his weapon becomes his girlfriend. I don't know how much of this is true, but it seems real. He keeps competing and designs another machine gun and then finishes the AK in 1947 and it aces all the tests becoming the weapon of the country.
The movie is just this. A simple A to B story. Man makes machine gun, man meets girl. But does it have to be much more? It feels like a sports movie really. A guy trains, develops his inner talent, and becomes the winner. The formula works really well. You want to see what happens to him and what he will do. I think especially for guys this works. It's basically the male equivalent of a romance. We keep watching and enjoying this stuff. Plus this is about an inventor which is cool. And then about a machine gun and it's a historical movie. It basically has more than enough things going for it to be enjoyable to the average gun nerd or history nerd. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I do recommend it, but it's not essential as such.
There are some glaring issues with it. It's simple with simple acting, simple plots, and simple scenes. It never tries to be more. That's the issue. The dialogue is on the nose. They constantly repeat that he has to compete vs. Other guns a certain day. Or that he has lost the competition. We can figure all of this out via the scenes. They don't need to constantly spell it out like we are stupid. Often scenes are also just appearing out of nowhere. We see him lose a competition then sit in a doctor's office in the next scene. The events don't always lead into one another. It's a movie made out of scenes not a character moving from A to B. So Mikhail Kalashnikov is reactive. Very shy, short, thin. He moves with everyone around him. The forward momentum of the plot moves us along, but he really should have been more interesting. Often he's a Charlie Chaplin without the comedy. Walks weird, acts autistic, never speaks out of turn. It feels weird. It's like he's too shy to move in the world. Furthermore the dialogue about the weapon design is simplistic. Hell, we don't even see the other guns. The script clearly was written by people who don't know anything about guns. When he improves the design he just says stuff like "I made it simpler". When he has to direct a worker he points to a document and says "improve this thing". It's not technical dialogue. Not a single word refers to anything technical. So we have a lot of design scenes that are only visual. You really miss more explanations or at least they could have shown the designs. What works and doesn't? How did he make the AK? It's like it's some super secret they can't reveal in the movie. We just see him design something and either stuff works or it doesn't. Very weird movie. You can easily make a smash hit by making a similar movie about some other invention and then have real life dialogue not movie fakeness. That would be amazing. Just slow improvements of some weapon one part at a time all explained. The camera work is great. Calm and steady! The movie looks great.
I really enjoyed Flash of Genius (2008) about a new windshield wiper and how the inventor tried to sell the design and then sued Ford for copying his design. I don't know if they did or not. But it's Hollywood so they did. Anyhow he won the lawsuit and got filthy rich as you get from suing such a giant company. Cute movie with a lot of emotional appeal in capitalistic USA. Crying, laughing, complaining. Kalashnikov (2020) is all clean. All scenes are clean, we don't see any mud, most people are upstanding citizens, the leaders are nice, Stalin's posters are seen everywhere. Even the battlefields and field hospitals are clean and cozy. It looks like stuff you'd see on patriotic propaganda posters not real life. No one steals anything. Everyone is eager to work for his country and die for the country too. Everyone only works for the collective. They cleaned up USSR and Stalin a hell lot here. Hell, the only living space we see is a house in Moscow where his girlfriend lives. A big wooden house. We don't even see a single apartment. Even his native village looks like something out of a fairy tale. Everything looks so wonderful. Did random drawing artists live in houses alone near Moscow? And how did people get by? They do mention rations and the collective taking his parent's farm. But besides these small mentions we never see much of it. We don't see any criminality or anyone complaining about the system. We don't even once see anyone get a paycheck or worry about wages. Everyone has all the food and money he needs. The negativity of the state is not part of any plot or event. So most of the potential drama is removed and we just get his inner conflicts as the main drama which doesn't quite work. His feeling of being a failure just makes him more reactive and the drama then ends up taking away as much from the movie as it puts into it. It's especially weird as he is super successful. So him worrying and being his biggest enemy makes no logical sense. The USSR setting is really all you needed for proper drama. Like with Doctor Zhivago or Citizen X. Shame Russians are legally not allowed to do the same in their own movies. They even ban movies that make fun of any historical figure and overall largely refuse any negative look at their military or leadership as there are a ton of laws banning even talk about this. So the movie could have been better. It's overly cutesy and basic. But it's still quite enjoyable. Many biographies produced by the subject himself are made the same way where only the positive stuff is shown. So it's not totally unwatchable or unacceptable. It just feels fake. I'm sure Soviet in WW2 during Stalin was not really this wonderful.
Overall it's just a simple feel good movie with a few historical elements to it. But it works. You keep watching it and keep waiting for the big wins. You get them and are happy. I can't complain much. I just wish it had technical jargon in it. The movie assumes the viewer is not interested in weapon designs whatsoever. Big shame.
The movie is just this. A simple A to B story. Man makes machine gun, man meets girl. But does it have to be much more? It feels like a sports movie really. A guy trains, develops his inner talent, and becomes the winner. The formula works really well. You want to see what happens to him and what he will do. I think especially for guys this works. It's basically the male equivalent of a romance. We keep watching and enjoying this stuff. Plus this is about an inventor which is cool. And then about a machine gun and it's a historical movie. It basically has more than enough things going for it to be enjoyable to the average gun nerd or history nerd. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I do recommend it, but it's not essential as such.
There are some glaring issues with it. It's simple with simple acting, simple plots, and simple scenes. It never tries to be more. That's the issue. The dialogue is on the nose. They constantly repeat that he has to compete vs. Other guns a certain day. Or that he has lost the competition. We can figure all of this out via the scenes. They don't need to constantly spell it out like we are stupid. Often scenes are also just appearing out of nowhere. We see him lose a competition then sit in a doctor's office in the next scene. The events don't always lead into one another. It's a movie made out of scenes not a character moving from A to B. So Mikhail Kalashnikov is reactive. Very shy, short, thin. He moves with everyone around him. The forward momentum of the plot moves us along, but he really should have been more interesting. Often he's a Charlie Chaplin without the comedy. Walks weird, acts autistic, never speaks out of turn. It feels weird. It's like he's too shy to move in the world. Furthermore the dialogue about the weapon design is simplistic. Hell, we don't even see the other guns. The script clearly was written by people who don't know anything about guns. When he improves the design he just says stuff like "I made it simpler". When he has to direct a worker he points to a document and says "improve this thing". It's not technical dialogue. Not a single word refers to anything technical. So we have a lot of design scenes that are only visual. You really miss more explanations or at least they could have shown the designs. What works and doesn't? How did he make the AK? It's like it's some super secret they can't reveal in the movie. We just see him design something and either stuff works or it doesn't. Very weird movie. You can easily make a smash hit by making a similar movie about some other invention and then have real life dialogue not movie fakeness. That would be amazing. Just slow improvements of some weapon one part at a time all explained. The camera work is great. Calm and steady! The movie looks great.
I really enjoyed Flash of Genius (2008) about a new windshield wiper and how the inventor tried to sell the design and then sued Ford for copying his design. I don't know if they did or not. But it's Hollywood so they did. Anyhow he won the lawsuit and got filthy rich as you get from suing such a giant company. Cute movie with a lot of emotional appeal in capitalistic USA. Crying, laughing, complaining. Kalashnikov (2020) is all clean. All scenes are clean, we don't see any mud, most people are upstanding citizens, the leaders are nice, Stalin's posters are seen everywhere. Even the battlefields and field hospitals are clean and cozy. It looks like stuff you'd see on patriotic propaganda posters not real life. No one steals anything. Everyone is eager to work for his country and die for the country too. Everyone only works for the collective. They cleaned up USSR and Stalin a hell lot here. Hell, the only living space we see is a house in Moscow where his girlfriend lives. A big wooden house. We don't even see a single apartment. Even his native village looks like something out of a fairy tale. Everything looks so wonderful. Did random drawing artists live in houses alone near Moscow? And how did people get by? They do mention rations and the collective taking his parent's farm. But besides these small mentions we never see much of it. We don't see any criminality or anyone complaining about the system. We don't even once see anyone get a paycheck or worry about wages. Everyone has all the food and money he needs. The negativity of the state is not part of any plot or event. So most of the potential drama is removed and we just get his inner conflicts as the main drama which doesn't quite work. His feeling of being a failure just makes him more reactive and the drama then ends up taking away as much from the movie as it puts into it. It's especially weird as he is super successful. So him worrying and being his biggest enemy makes no logical sense. The USSR setting is really all you needed for proper drama. Like with Doctor Zhivago or Citizen X. Shame Russians are legally not allowed to do the same in their own movies. They even ban movies that make fun of any historical figure and overall largely refuse any negative look at their military or leadership as there are a ton of laws banning even talk about this. So the movie could have been better. It's overly cutesy and basic. But it's still quite enjoyable. Many biographies produced by the subject himself are made the same way where only the positive stuff is shown. So it's not totally unwatchable or unacceptable. It just feels fake. I'm sure Soviet in WW2 during Stalin was not really this wonderful.
Overall it's just a simple feel good movie with a few historical elements to it. But it works. You keep watching it and keep waiting for the big wins. You get them and are happy. I can't complain much. I just wish it had technical jargon in it. The movie assumes the viewer is not interested in weapon designs whatsoever. Big shame.