We finished watching Agoniya tonight. The film was somewhat of a letdown. You’d figure any film that was banned by the Soviet government for several years would be good, no? In this case, no.

At the part where we saw the screenshots shown here, a little past the middle of the movie, where Rasputin seems to be possessed, we told each other it could just as well be an American movie.

Alexei Petrenko did a remarkable acting job as Rasputin. Anatoli Romashin did a good enough job playing Nicholas II as a weak character. But that doesn’t make the movie good. There are caricatures but no character development. There is nothing in it to explain human behavior and its relation to the history of nations.

I see that the director, Elem Klimov, also produced Come and See. That film had a lot of the same flaws as this one. It didn’t demonstrate human behaviors as coming from normal human failings; therefore it didn’t show the full horror of war.

The interspersing of newsreel footage is a heavy-handed way of trying to show the significance of what is happening. Those parts are put together fairly well, though.

We kept wondering which of those are actual newsreel footage, and which were made up for the movie, and which (if any) might have come from older movies. Some of the English language web sites say they are all simulated newsreels. Another site says they’re real. But I don’t think they can all be real. I wish I knew just which ones, if any, are from actual newsreels.