Friday One Sheet: THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN

What went wrong here, exactly?

Normally, this column is a celebration of novel, or exceptionally designed key art from around the world. Today, however we shall take a look at one of the worst posters of the year, one that sits somewhere in the Uncanny Valley, coupled with a kind of generic laziness. 

This hurts a bit, because I quite liked Olivier Assayas's peek into the Soviet collapse of the 1990s, and the evolution of the Russkiy Mir with the rise of industry Oligarchs and Vladimir Putin to reinvent the state TV as a more media-savvy entity charged to whip the population into a frenzy of hate. I loved Paul Dano and Jude Law's performances, as the political artist and the aspiring dictator, in The Wizard Of The Kremlin. But in the movie, the actors still look like...themselves.

What is happing with the glaring visages in this poster?  Was AI used to 'russify' their mugs in a way that does not organically exist in the film? Why the busy red and white alternating typography.  Why is the lighting at odds with colour-keyed background of the Saint Basil's Cathedral? There must be a better way. (It is even worse here with similar elements in a poster so bad, I could not bear to show it.)

For a picture about art and media manipulation, this design is either completely tone deaf or a work of subversive genius. I cannot get past the unnecessarily busy red and white typography, and the lazy 1990s Walmart DVD framing, where actors 'heads peak above the rack' design. I suppose, at least, the heads are not floating. Maybe it is simply the glares. Those glares! Stop looking at me guys. You are giving me the willies, giving off 'we didn't want to have this picture taken' energy.