Under Electric Clouds (2015) - Aleksey German

Aleksey German's Under Electric Clouds is a challenging portrait of humanity, a film that is utterly ambitious in its indictment of the current state of Russia, which manages to be as elusively oblique as it's transfixing.  Taking place exactly one hundred years after the communist-led Russian Revolution, Under Electric Clouds is set in 2017 Russia, where the future looks incredibly bleak due to what is expected to be another world war.  Told through a series of interconnected vignettes, Under Electric Clouds is a philosophically bleak examination of humanity, a film that is far from streamlined but utterly fascinating due to its powerful ideas and stunning visual design.  Through these interconnected stories, Under Electric Clouds is an existential story of humanity, a film that almost professes that we are all just animals trying to do the best we can, with the human condition being full of continuous attempts at success no matter the amount of times we fail.  There is a lot of sadness within this repetitious try, fail, try, fail nature of humanity, with Under Electric Clouds being a story of despair and seclusion, an experience that perfectly matched by its visual design, a dark, cloudy atmospheric palette, creating a look of dystopia the filmmakers' no question intended. The existential component of Under Electric Clouds relates to the idea that our individual lives are by proxy meaningless, with the cycle of human failures and successes as it relates to politics, humanitarianism, etc throughout history hardly improving on the grand scale of time.  While I'm sure this film sounds incredibly depressing and boring by now, Under Electric Clouds presents these ideas in a way that somehow manages to never feel all doom and gloom, as the film's tone routinely oscillates between black comedy and hyper serious hypothesis about humanity and the meaning of our existence.  Beneath all the conjecture, Death is a major element Under Electric Clouds too, being presented in a very cold, matter of fact nature throughout the vignettes, another reminder by the filmmaker of how meaningless individuals are in the grand scheme of things.  One of the more interesting components of Under The Electric Clouds is its commentary on the the failures of globalism, presenting a pointed commentary on how it has only created a fallacy of togetherness, with forced collectivism being in a space where money, and power, still reign.  History and tradition by proxy have been trampled for the perceived better future, with perhaps my favorite commentary of Under Electric Clouds being how it reveals how dangerous that blanket assumption can be, this ideal that the future will always be better than the past, or present.  A hyper ambitious study of not only Russia but humanity itself, Under Electric Clouds is a somewhat messy, but always intoxicating, existential and spiritual journey about a host of fascinating hypothesis.

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