On October 19, “Planet Maximus,” a recording of a performance by Alexander Petrov and the band Ocean Jet, is released in Russian theaters. The statement is personal and touching, but is it interesting for an outside viewer to watch? We tell you in th...

A half-empty stage, with a bathtub filled with water at the center. Somewhere among the audience, a person in a cheap Spider-Man costume wanders, muttering something unintelligible before heading to the stage. This is how “Planet Maximus” begins, a near one-man show by screenwriter, director, and lead (and not only) actor Alexander Petrov.

Changing into everyday clothes and taking out a box labeled “Fragile,” Sasha (as shown on screen) begins to tell the story of his friend Max, occasionally adopting his persona. He talks about his friend’s relationships with girls, how illness struck him, and along with it, real love—which in art always triumphs over death.

The desire to immortalize a friend’s memory in this way is touching and commendable. The idea of turning this story into a multimedia show, where colors burst on screen alongside video inserts, where artist Ekaterina Channova appears and undoubtedly enhances the performance, and where the band Ocean Jet plays and sings live—is original. But it seems so only on paper.

If there are no complaints about the music of Ocean Jet—it is beautiful, and even the band’s first Russian-language song sounds organic—then the rest of the structure resembles a constantly built house of cards, where you can’t build more than one or two floors.

The plot oscillates between awkward, almost rom-com-like sketches, where Max interacts with girls, each time deciding she’s the one, to rhetorical questions of nearly universal scale. At such moments, actor Petrov, like a messiah, turns on his relentless megaphone and begins to preach about how we, the audience, should live and why making mistakes is normal.

Sasha also reads his own poetry with heart-wrenching intensity, which, like the entire “Planet Maximus,” is about everything at once and nothing in particular. Moreover, there are often no prerequisites for such intensity—neither scripted, nor dictated by the atmosphere, nor embedded in the poorly rhymed lines.

An undeniable advantage of the project’s multimedia nature is the visual cues indicating who is speaking at any given moment. Otherwise, it is utterly impossible to tell whether Max or Petrov himself is talking. There are no metamorphoses in the acting, no transformations between characters—none of that. And indeed, why bother? When the words are so laden with emotion, and the pathos from the actor, who bloodies his fists but, like DiCaprio, never stops the show, exceeds all conceivable bounds.

Attempts to add extra unconventionality to a simple and not very coherent plot also come across as vulgar. Petrov walks through the audience, flirts with cameras, shouts into the water while the camera films him from inside the aforementioned bathtub, interacts with the musicians for no apparent reason, and so on. If there is an intention to break the fourth wall and go beyond classical storytelling, there should be at least a drop of awareness and creativity in it.

Having such a touching personal story at hand, one that is truly capable of moving people, Alexander Petrov, an undoubtedly charming actor, unfortunately pulled the blanket over himself, showing nothing that we haven’t seen from him before. And that is sad, because the intention was noble, and the opportunity to show that every person is a unique planet was literally lying on the surface.

Trailer: