Kind of an unusual situation with VNEZEMNOY (EXTRATERRESTRIAL). I'm writing this review in May 2019. VNEZEMNOY was made in 2011. Surprisingly, even in 2019, VNEZEMNOY has only one extant review which is dated 2014 as I write this, and that one is virtually incomprehensible.
What makes all of this unusual is that VNEZEMNOY is a good quality science fiction movie and it's apparently all but unknown and certainly unloved. Given how many science fiction movies in the El Cheapo market space are so execrable you'd think the rare good one would get more attention. On this point, I will observe that it was difficult to find VNEZEMNOY on IMDb because, as a Westerner, I know the movie as EXTRATERRESTRIAL and it's NOT listed as that on IMDb. On IMDb it's called VNEZEMNOY and is only searchable/findable by that name. Perhaps this accounts for its perceived lack of attention; maybe people aren't finding it so they can't comment on it. Might I suggest to the people of IMDb that they get their collective head out of the dark and stinky place and make some provision for locating movies with multiple titles because multi-title movies do happen quite often. Not to have some obvious accommodation for that fact as part of the search process is just stupid and user-hostile.
I saw VNEZEMNOY listed as EXTRATERRESTRIAL in its Ukrainian, Russian-language original version with English subtitles on Amazon Prime Video.
In terms of subject matter, VNEZEMNOY is fairly mundane along the gray space alien "visitors" line featuring little gray space aliens, abductions, an alien corpse, crop circles et al.
But there are many facets of VNEZEMNOY that make it outstanding. Firstly, while VNEZEMNOY is obviously very low-budget, that fact is virtually invisible. It's low-budget is carefully wrapped around a storyline and setting that naturally tends to conceal its budgetary restraints. There are very few special-effects in the movie which works for the movie in a very organic way. If there WERE lots of special-effects they'd actually be incongruous given the setting.
VNEZEMNOY takes place in and around a small, rural Ukrainian town not far from Chernobyl. The accent is heavily on "rural". None of the main characters, for example, has a car and people get from place to place riding bicycles down dirt tracks, hitching a ride on some dilapidated horse-drawn cart, or, if they have to go any significant distance, taking a rusty, rickety, breakdown-prone old public transportation bus. The homes that we see look like sharecropper hovels circa 1930s. When somebody dials a telephone, they do have pushbuttons, but you can hear make/break clicking in the background with each button push. Fences are often made with whatever sticks they can find in the local forest and cut to length. Or just falling down.
Ukrainian culture is on display in spades. Babushkas wearing babushkas and complaining about their lost goats in grating voices are an everyday occurrence. Bottles of water are not carried around, but bottles of vodka are. At least one character is perpetually pickled in vodka at all times and encourages everyone, except his difficult Ukrainian fireplug of a wife, to join him at every opportunity. Lots of yelling, small town Ukrainian mentality, everything dilapidated, the ubiquitous sense of government weight bearing down and being watched, and so on. I have no way of knowing if these representations are accurate or stereotypical relative to what life is really like in such contexts, but it certainly FEELS legitimate to my Westerner's ignorance. VNEZEMNOY is definitely not a comedy. The omnipresence of alcohol is not a humorous comment; it's just a fact.
Watching a "visitors"-style story with the usual elements play out in a completely different context from what I'm accustomed to with excellent acting made the story entirely fresh to me. Even the official-government-suppression part had a Russian/Ukrainian flavor to it; it wasn't just suppression, it was suppression with an implied thick topping of terrible personal consequences for noncooperation. Here in the United States, all space alien visitors storylines tend to happen around the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND or X-FILES format.
The only real annoyance I had with watching VNEZEMNOY had nothing to do with the movie itself. The subtitles as they appear on the version hosted by Amazon Prime Video were terrible. They were full of misspellings and grammar errors; much of the translations appear to be literal, and literal translations of Russian to English are jarring.
I can't recommend VNEZEMNOY enough. Though the space alien aspects of the movie were unexceptional and uninventive, the excellent acting combined with the placement of a space alien story in a unique (to me) context and cultural setting of a small rural Ukrainian town made this movie eminently enjoyable. The fact that this was a low-budget effort damaged it not at all. In fact, just the opposite. I would deem VNEZEMNOY to be very high-quality and made with professional workmanship.
