University lecturer Oleg (Igor Petrenko) and his best friend Sergey (Vladimir Yaglych) previously travelled through time from their home in modern day, 21st Century Russia to the Russia of the past: the past of World War 2, to be exact. While they were there, Oleg fell in love with a young nurse called Maria (Ekaterina Klemova), but when they had to return to the present, he believed she had died in the fighting. However, when he is investigating the history of what he went through, he happens to see a photograph in an old woman's apartment that shows Maria safe and well some time after he thought she had died...
If you can't work it out from that introduction, Paradox Soldiers was actually a sequel, a follow up to a fair sized hit in its native Russia called My iz budushchego, which basically means We Are from the Future, or indeed We Are the Future. It was time travel time again, and as these things can get confusing the fact that this was part two of a story that many outside of Eastern Europe would probably not have seen meant that you might feel all at sea should you choose to take a chance on it if you were not one of the initiated. However, rest assured that jumping straight into the second instalment was not as baffling as it could have been.
It simply felt as if you were arriving late for the party, that was all. Stretching logic, the duo of Muscovites end up transported back to the past once again, thanks to an exploding World War 2 bomb, only in this instance they were accompanied by two Ukranian students, tough guy Taras (Aleksei Barabash) and his higher class, more ineffectual best friend Mikola (Dmitri Stupka). It's all these two chaps' fault for what happens, as Oleg and Sergey were in the countryside to join in with a battle re-enactment between the Russians and the Ukranians, with the latter on the side of the Nazis, a controversial subject that got this film banned in the Ukraine.
Though that was a pity when the storyline was obviously trying a spot of bridge building between the nations, as if to say, hey, you were Nazi sympathisers back then, but we're all friends again now, right? Sort of a backhanded compliment, really, but the filmmakers' hearts seemed to be in the right place even if they were not so subtly taking the higher moral ground. Mainly this was an excuse for a load of battle re-enactments of their own as once the bomb goes off (thanks to the students' horseplay) what do you know? It's 1944 again, and the four are dressed in the vintage uniforms of their respective countries, with all the problems you can imagine.
This lot were obviously fans of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, because the combat here was shot in similar style, though with the fantasy element the immediacy was somewhat missing, thanks to us not being convinced that they would allow anything too horrible to happen to the future visitors. But after a while it's just one damn thing after another, and the traditional dilemma arises as it always does in time travel fiction when Oleg finally catches up with Maria to find that she's pregnant, and he has to save her husband in spite of shall we say, mixed feelings about the arrangement. He also has to save the baby when Maria goes into labour, as all the while the bullets are whistling past their ears and shells are detonating around them - it should be tense but as I say, you never doubt it will all work out fine. For war movie aficionados, there should be enough to satisfy, though not so much for sci-fi fans... and the baby? He grew up to be Vladimir Putin. Oh no, no he didn't, forget I said that.
