Major Grom: Plague Doctor at once leans into and questions that paradigm. Yes, normally vigilantes are a bad idea, but this specific man, whose intentions are noble and good, he will save us from the villains. The premise of any superhero film is that an extraordinary man can be allowed to bend and break the rules everyone else has to follow (for example the state’s monopoly on violence) and instead of being terrifying it’s somehow comforting.
MAJOR GROM THE PLAGUE DOCTOR MOVIE
But in every single origin movie for Batman (and there have been several) the lesson Batman never learns is that his impressive abilities simply don’t cut it for the final battle unless he has help from his friends.Īnother way in which Major Grom: Plague Doctor shows its genre savvy is that it actually questions the methods of its hero within the context of the movie itself. For another, they’re both loners whose closest relationship is with an older man who acts as a father figure (for Grom this is the police chief who practically raised him after the death of Grom’s parents). He’s just a man in a suit, a detective trying to solve crimes. For one, like Grom, Batman doesn’t have superpowers. The best comparison between Grom and a western superhero is probably Batman. Yes, the hero has friends and sidekicks, but in the final confrontation, the last major battle, the hero must stand alone and prove he’s worthy and capable of defeating the villain on his own.
This may seem like a trivial lesson to learn, but it’s practically antithetical to the way comic book movies work in their current Hollywood incarnation, especially when it comes to origin stories. For all his intelligence, experience, and physical strength, Grom fails in his confrontation with the Plague Doctor, until his friends step in. He is quite literally useless without his friends, his family, his community. The crux of the movie, however, lies in the fact that Grom is wrong. He works alone, he needs no one he can crash or punch anything in his way if necessary. Grom is the stereotypical lone wolf, alpha male cop. In the Russian version that also happens, but not in quite in the same way. In the purely Hollywood version of this story, Grom would team up with Dima, the junior cop who looks up to him, and Yulia, the plucky investigative reporter, to stop this menace. The murderer wears the costume of a seventeenth-century plague doctor-complete with the bird mask-and proclaims that his purpose is to cleanse the city of the plague of its corrupt elites.
MAJOR GROM THE PLAGUE DOCTOR SERIES
Just as Sergei Razumovsky, a shy and nerdy tech genius, publicly launches his groundbreaking social app, a “madman in a mask” commits a series of heinous murders against the city’s elite, making sure to share them on the internet. Grom’s methods, however, seem to be just right for the latest crime spree sweeping the city.
Grom is the quintessential cop who doesn’t play by the rules-after the movie’s big opening chase scene, where Grom apprehends some bank robbers while destroying a city monument, his boss summons him for a hearing and all the other cops place bets on whether Grom really will be fired for his antics this time. It tries to give you all the things you like, but also enough things that are different, shiny, and new, so that you walk away from the experience feeling like someone gave you a new version of your favorite thing.īased on a comic book from 2012 and set in a fictional version of Saint Petersburg, the movie follows police detective Major Grom (a real Russian surname that means “thunder”) as he crashes and slashes his way through the city’s thefts, burglaries, and murders. It knows you both enjoy the Hollywood formula and feel bored by it.
It’s a movie that knows you’ve probably seen dozens of movies like it before. Major Grom: Plague Doctor (2021) is not the first superhero movie to come out of Russia, but it’s certainly the most significant, and the best made.
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