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Mstyslav Chernov/Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW

2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025)

The documentary "2000 Meters to Andriivka" takes its Sundance Film Festival audience back to the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive against invading Russian forces, an operation with mixed results now recorded in the books and which even at the time seemed likely to turn into grinding costly warfare. That description looks like a light euphemism while watching Mstyslav Chernov's documentary, built around first-person footage from body-mounted cameras worn by Ukrainian soldiers and by Mr. Chernov, embedded in their brigade and coming under as much fire as the rest of them. The military goal is the strategic village of Andriivka, approached via a dead-straight strip of charred forest between two large and deeply cratered mine fields; not the last time that the film's visuals have an aura of the fictional about them, the harshest battlefield a production designer could concoct. A Ukrainian soldier himself says it's "like another planet." But this is all humans at work.

These firefights are visceral, distressing, confusing, deadly. Attacks come from Russian drones, distant artillery, and enemy troops dug into trenches and lying in wait; ancient and modern warfare are jammed together. In between, during the hurry-up-and-wait, soldiers tell Mr. Chernov about the lives they left behind and will be going back to. But all of them are much more concerned about dealing with the loathed Russian invaders first. An early conversation with a pragmatic 22-year-old ends with Mr. Chernov's voice-over saying that this man will be caught under fire five months later and never seen again. After another soldier mere yards from the cameraman is killed instantly by a sniper bullet, the film pauses to show his funeral back home. The commentary notes that it's the 56th funeral in the village since the Russian invasion; and also that another soldier seen holding the dead man's hand in battle will soon be dead himself. The meat grinder grinds on.

The grinder's methods, though, evolve. A Russian suicide drone zips across the sky before diving to the ground and exploding. Although the ways pop-culture and reality have now been tangled together are generally dire, seeing this and thinking instinctively of James Cameron films might be not just inevitable but appropriate, two threads of the Entertainment Industrial Complex connecting in your head. Then the camera's shaky first-person viewpoint happens to catch a fork of lightning in the background, a near-perfect cinematic visual. Footage from Ukrainian drones filming vertically down to monitor the fighting gives Mr. Chernov shots that look exactly like the languid aerial views of landscape that Denis Villeneuve likes. And throughout, the first-person-shooter mode of the film is an overlap with all those video games presenting sanitized versions of similar things, an entire industry careful to say that the pleasures of playing military dress-up shouldn't be taken as relating to the stomach churning nature of the real thing. Indeed they do not.

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