At one point in Sputnik, a character says that “weapons guarantee peace.” It’s the kind of statement that feels appropriate for a movie set in Soviet Kazakhstan in 1983. An ominous synth score introduces two astronauts in space on their way home. On board the Russian craft Orbit-4, cosmonauts Konstantin (Pyotr Fyodorov) and his friend and partner in space Kirill Averchenko (Aleksey Demidov) are ready to be back on terra firma. Averchenko’s immediate plan is to hit the showers while Konstantin looks a little haunted as, with a heavy sigh, he says his ambiguous plans are to go to Rostov for some uncertain reason.

After they’ve undocked and are falling back into orbit, something goes wrong as a shadow passes over one of the windows and continues its thudding presence to the escape hatch, red warning lights flashing. The result is a crashed pod, the smashed helmet and bloody, eviscerated skull of Averchenko and Konstantin pulling himself out of the pod, dazed and confused before vomiting blood on the ground.

After this unsettling opening, we’re whisked to the Institute of Brain AMS in USSR where Tatiana (Oksana Akinshina) awaits a tribunal for her unconventional methods of saving a kid’s life. She’s brought up on the charge of negligence for holding the kid underwater for close to a minute. But Tatiana shows no remorse, telling the tribunal, “I did what was necessary.” The kid’s mother sees things differently and now Tatiana must either submit her resignation or the case will escalate to a prosecutor.

But a man watching from the balcony has another option. His name is Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk) and he needs Tatiana’s expert opinion on Konstantin, who is secretly being held in a mountain facility away from Moscow and his adoring fans. Konstantin is a national hero and the mysterious landing had to be sanitized for the media until they can figure out what’s wrong with him. Tatiana is the kind of no-nonsense scientist who’s willing to take unconventional methods to save a kid’s life, even at the risk of ruining her career and Semiradov sees her as as the perfect candidate for this unprecedented situation.

Konstantin is being held at a military facility, filled with soldiers on duty and CC cameras capturing her every move. There she meets the arrogant doctor Yan Rigel (Anton Vasiliev), who isn’t happy to share the potential glory of their discovery with Tatiana. As Tatiana examines the national hero, she’s willing to write it off as PTSD and wants to go home. “Cosmonauts aren’t the only ones who need my help,” she says after her initial examination.

But that night, she sees the truth as Konstantin vomits out a placenta-covered slug that unfurls into one of the more interesting alien representations I’ve seen on screen. And as the dawning horror of the situation dawns on her, Semiradov further establishes the situation: “We sent two into orbit...yet three returned to Earth.”

Directed by Egor Abramenko from a script by Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev, Sputnik is a striking debut feature film that feels like a perfect homage to some of the themes explored in Alien. Unlike the Xenomorph in the classic series, the creature at the heart of Sputnik has more of a connection to its host and part of the intrigue throughout most of the film comes from our understanding, through our onscreen proxy scientists, of what the creature is and isn’t.

The alien itself is a fascinating design and while it’s completely computer generated it looks more realistic and present than CG in big budget films. I love the design of the organism with its snakelike body and long, body-sized mouth and pinpoints of spider-like eyes on its face. And the concept behind it is horrifying, as it lives in the body as a 30 centimeter larva only to be constantly birthed and rebirthed to feed, unfurling to 1.5 meters in length.

The question of whether it’s a parasite or a symbiote fills up much of the first half and becomes a subtle, yet striking metaphor for the concept of heroism. The people of Moscow look to Konstantin as a hero, with media reports harkening his return to the public in three weeks. It’s the push/pull of the outside image of the hero as a symbiotic relationship with heroism and national pride and the more parasitic nature of the character in real life that provides most of the thematic depth.

Konstantin seems to be the antithesis of what we would consider heroic. He’s arrogant and has a shallow view of the world and what it owes him: “Read my files. I’m the hero of the Soviet Union,” he proudly proclaims at one point before Tatiana cuts him down with a question about his abandoned son. The character work between the two provides an interesting subtext to the investigation of the creature’s physiology and biological intent, mirroring the fine line between symbiosis and parasitism.

At just under two hours, it gets a little long in the teeth towards the end and while some set pieces are expected, it feels a bit at odds with the story it’s telling. The buildup of heroism/regular people and its relationship to symbiosis/parasitism gets muddled in the back half as it resolves to add some action and violence to the proceedings. Unfortunately, the denouement doesn’t hit in the way the filmmakers probably intended and comes across more schmaltzy than profound, particularly in the resolution of a side story involving a child at an orphanage.

That said, Sputnik remains one of the most interesting Alien homages I’ve seen. Like Alien, its focus is on understanding the organism and its interactions with humanity but it’s anchored in people. The arrogance of national heroes and the emphasis on who deserves to live and who deserves fame vice whose lives are deemed immaterial is also explored in fascinating ways.

Those deemed immaterial are used as fodder to create a national myth because, as a character says in Sputnik, “Victors are not judged.”