yavermbizi

"Kontakt" is the first non-series-related thing that I've decided to review on IMDb. I've been _rating_ some non-series-related things, sure, but as I've been pretty universally strongly disliking them and cutting my time with them short, I wasn't going to be writing a review for one. Finally, though, here's a thing that I didn't absolutely hate, so I ought to write a review... Thing is, the only reason why I didn't hate it is that it's pretty brief and its problems don't have the time to pile up quite as much.

The short miraculously manages to be very boring even in that runtime, but when it's not boring, it tends to be unpleasant and unsightly to look at, so pick your poison, I guess. The only thing I liked was the much-praised alien design. Yeah, it's cool, I like this psychedelic slug-thing. No point in wasting your time to see it, though.

This collection of YouTube shorts boasts very impressive CGI work; fun, quirky humour and charm; neat allusions to Russian, Soviet and international pop culture; and as a special ingredient, this kind of Russian soulfullness that might just make the name "birchpunk" more than just a lame branding variation on "cyberpunk". Indeed, this series plays with the core cyberpunk idea of "high tech, low life" in a quite fun way: instead of the life being explicitly bad for the majority due to the suffocating dominance of the corporations, this Russian cyberpunk has a somewhat more optimistic vision: life is bad, because it's always kinda bad, if you concentrate on these aspects, but people make it work, and the advances of technology certainly enable higher highs even if the lows stay low.

For all of its positive aspects, the series falters whenever it tries to have a deeper level of story and worldbuilding than as just a collection of gags. Whenever it goes beyond firing off one-off jokes or placeholderish believable dialogue (made quite fun by juxtaposition against the unbelievable setting), the writers really stumble, and can only write incoherent, cliched narratives that only worsen the experience. These shorts for sure work better as guided tours into this world than as narrativised stories, so I'm somewhat dreading looking into these creators' longer-form effort, "Kibierdierievnia"

Still, this great shorts collection is well-worth anybody's time, and is possibly a must-watch to people from Russia and the near abroad, who are best poised to enjoy the setting.

This short starts with a previously-on section. I tend to hate these as an outdated vestige of a past era of not-on-demand media, and here it's one of the most perplexing cases yet: the series not just being a web one on the on-demand YouTube service, but one composed solely of shorts. Are the creators genuinely worried that people's attention spans have gotten so low they can't remember what happened in the 6-minute-long short they'd seen a second ago? All this section does is remind me of the previous episode's bad acting and jokes, and draw my attention to a previously-overlooked fail of continuity: the background and the overlay name the WHO stand-in differently.

The entire plot is stupid and nonsensical and none of the gags are funny. It doesn't work as an adventure either. The worldbuilding is incoherent. Worst episode of the series by a huge margin.