Burnt by the Sun 2 by Nikita Mikhalkov is a daring, innovative film. Its running time is three hours. It is at once an exciting yet tiring, stunning yet exhausting spectacle, like war itself. The film presents a new cinematic format: unusual, uncomfortable, frustrating, just like any other new ingenious works of art, literature, music or even science. Similarly to the Great Patriotic War, which could not have lasted a year or two or three, but four, the film did not fit the timeframe of one and a half or two hours, but only of three. Burnt by the Sun 2 possesses a specific code, a formula of the war it discusses. Its scope is broad and deep. It reveals a matrix of the Soviet state: from the barrack of the camp where Kotov is serving his sentence and Stalin's dacha in Kuntzevo to the frontlines on the outskirts of Moscow. Yet the film is completely devoid of rhetoric or pathos: it is simple, expressive, bright and objective. This is how the entire film and the cinematic novel about Colonel Kotov are constructed, inclusing Burnt by the Sun, Burnt by the Sun 2, and The Citadel.


SITE NOTE: Gleb Panfilov is a renowned Russian film director who co-wrote the script for Burnt by the Sun 2.