Lenfilm titan Aleksei Jurevič German's plan to adapt Arkadiy & Boris Strugackiy's 1964 novel “Trudno byt' bogom” for the cinema had been around since the late 1990s - a project that the master had been working on since the mid-1960s and which had left all kinds of traces in his work ever since. The production gained further weight (beyond the fact that it was a sui generis art cinema endeavor, even by Russian standards) when it became known that German was suffering from a disease diagnosed as incurable, meaning that the film would be his legacy. The result speaks for itself.
Hard to be a God (Trudno Byt' Bogom) is a visually monstrous, baroque science fiction epic made up of highly complex, often seemingly endless plan sequences, set on a planet whose civilization is at a stage of development roughly equivalent to our Middle Ages - with all the miasma and superstition that entails. An observer from another, more developed world is there to find out how inevitable certain socio(r)evolutionary aberrations are. The answer that German comes up with is devastating, but not hopeless - the tone may be apocalyptic, but in the end the Last Judgement is postponed once again.
