Russians, Americans, Georgians come together to make a movie about killing each other

Next week, work on the multi-million dollar movie, “Georgia,” about last year’s five-day-war between Georgia and Russia will conclude after months of shooting and blowing stuff up in locations across the nation.

The film has been an object of extreme curiosity among citizens and expats alike.

Whose side will it take?

Val Kilmer’s in the country? Hasn’t he gotten fat?

Wait, Andy Garcia is playing is playing Mikheil Saakashvili???

And the like.

The fact that it is directed by Renny Harlin, best known for directing Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2, only stirred more rumblings about what kind of movie will emerge from the backdrop of what is still a tense subject in this country. After all, the gunfire stopped just 15 months ago.

Although the circumstances of the war continue to be debated endlessly around the world in a polarized fashion, the film set was actually a very non-partisan setting, which is surprising given the crowd.

Like most big film productions, the crew is a hodgepodge of nationalities: an American director, a Peruvian cinematographer, American grips, Georgian cameramen, and, quite fittingly, Russian stuntmen and pyrotechnic experts.

It seemed a strange mix of folks to do a movie about a very recent war between a Russia and a U.S.-backed military, but apparently the political tensions were immediately iced through the use of humor, according my girlfriend, a Georgian who is working as a part of the cinematographer’s team.

“You guys just love blowing up Georgia don’t you?” the Georgians would say to the Russian demo experts.

“Can’t get enough!”

As the shooting went on, Russian stuntmen donned both Russian and Georgian uniforms for the movie’s action-packed battle scenes.

“The Georgian army is the strongest!” yelled a Russian stuntman in a Georgian uniform, having just mowed down several Russian special forces soldiers in the previous scene.

Silly how we all get along as long as the bullets are fake.

Despite the camaraderie on set, the film itself will not likely be received with equal welcome by both Russian and Georgian audiences. There should be no doubt that the film takes a side.

While my respected colleague, Paul Rimple, blasted the film in his blog, I personally find it hard to be outraged, given my expectations from the start.

Look, it’s a big budget Hollywood movie that is going to have to make a decent return to cover costs. That means it’s probably not going to be a complex examination of what is one of many festering conflict zones created by ethno-nationalism in the post-Soviet world.

No, it needs a bad guy; and, for American audiences, what better bad guy than the Russians? The title says it all.

The Georgian Ministry of Defense offered up its own troops, tanks, helicopters and jets for the battle scenes and who here thinks that they would have done that if the movie intended to portray the war as one that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili initiated by attacking the de facto capital of South Ossetia? — the version of events that the United States and Georgia deny, and independent and EU-sponsored reports confirm.

No hands in the air? That’s what I thought. While I myself declined to publish anything on the matter, due to obvious conflicts of interest, I still find the movie interesting from a number of perspectives. The film will debut at Cannes next year, and will hit theaters sometime thereafter. And regardless of whatever any expat here in Georgia tells you, we’re all going to go out and see it.