The makers of "Metro" call it the first disaster film in 25 years. Since Alexander Mitta's famous "Air Crew" with Leonid Filatov, Alexandra Yakovleva and Georgy Zhzhonov, no Russian film of this genre has been made. "Metro" is based on the novel of the same name by Dmitry Safonov about water from the Moskva River bursting into a metro tunnel — and the people trying to get out.
The blonde Irina (Svetlana Khodchenkova) has nearly decided to leave her husband — a modest surgeon at a city hospital — for her lover, a broad-shouldered developer. The husband (Sergei Puskepalis) suspects she has someone else. The lover (Anatoly Bely) insists that Irina finally choose between them.
Moscow is gridlocked. First the husband and his daughter, then the lover hurrying to a tender, descend into the metro. Rush hour, a crush of bodies. In the tunnel the train suddenly brakes: water bursts through a crack and floods the tunnel. The survivors try to make it to a station, or at least somewhere safer where they can be found. The instruments in the dispatcher's room flash furiously red — water from the Moskva River could flood the entire Circle Line. And then the catastrophe will engulf the city center.
Anton Megerdichev's disaster film works, and quite well at that. Here is Moscow, eternally jammed; here is the metro you can barely squeeze into. Here are emergency vehicles unable to reach the station closest to the disaster's epicenter. Here are the legends about bunkers and secret lines, here is the old track-walker no one believed when he warned about water in the tunnel, and the trainee driver enraptured by stories of urban explorers. All of the disaster-related plotlines are solidly written and played. Quite different is the impression made by the "surface" parts — a love triangle that is hard to believe in, formulaic dialogue, lonely slices of doctor's sausage left in a kitchen Irina's husband and daughter have just walked out of.
But if you ignore these obvious flaws, you get a classic disaster film — dynamic, suspenseful, close to home and easy to follow. The thesis that the over-dense construction in the Central Administrative District is to blame for everything is sure to find understanding among the target audience. So this first 25-year statement in the disaster genre turns out to be worth your attention.