Review: Space Dogs Wondrously Places Audiences in Laika’s Footsteps

From Rin Tin Tin to Air Bud to, well, YouTube, the canine and the moving image have had a long and, we like to imagine, loving relationship. Our friends, surrogates, rescuers, confidants, nannies, and, occasionally, sports champions, dogs are often imagined by the cinema to be mostly mute, hirsute little people, capable of whatever they set their domesticated, house-trained minds to. Sporting a title that comes amusingly close to the title of one Air Bud sequel, Elsa Kremer and Levin Peter’s documentary Space Dogs should serve as an eye-opener to those who’ve learned to see humans’ best friends as furry little children.

The dogs that took part in the Soviet Sputnik program—most famously Laika, a Moscow stray who became the first living being in space—are still heralded as heroes in Russia. The Kubrickian opening of Space Dogs—an abstract vision from the perspective of a Sputnik capsule re-entering our atmosphere, in which the Earth’s rim is subsumed by a wild purplish flame that suggests damaged photographic film—effectively puts an end to canine space-faring romanticism. It projects an image of a being unable to comprehend her contribution to space exploration, because she was an animal and because she was a corpse. As Aleksey Serebryakov’s narrator informs us, Laika died in her lonely orbit long before her capsule fell back into the atmosphere, when the friction of re-entry burnt her body to a crisp.

Although anti-romantic, the film isn’t averse to wonder. Much the opposite, though its sense of wonder finds root on our Earth, in the exterior facts of life and impenetrable inner lives of Moscow street dogs. Like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the psychedelic journey through colors from space culminates in Laika’s metaphorical rebirth, not in the form of a Star Child appearing above the Earth, but in that of a mangy male stray. The camera cuts to him lying supine at the end of an alleyway, almost as if he’d just fallen from the sky. He stirs and gets up, and Kremer and Peter follow the pooch and his rotating group of compatriots—so closely that you may wonder how the filmmakers got the dogs to disregard the camera—inviting us to see him as Laika’s ghost, or her legacy, or her life before she was rounded up and shot up into space, or somehow all of these at once. Being a stray in a film nearly empty of dialogue, he remains nameless throughout, but for the convenience’s sake, let’s call him Laika.

The obscure rituals of street-dog society captured by the film raise various questions: Why does Laika appear to try to eat the wheel well of a car? How did this mostly wild animal form a kind of partnership with a limping, slightly smaller street dog, and what are the limits of this seeming friendship? Why can’t Laika, who appears to be a German Shepherd mix, figure out how to eat a cat? The latter scene is a decisive moment of the film’s de-anthropomorphizing project. The camera catches Laika chasing a small white feline, whose panicked hisses and quick dodges are no match for the power of Laika’s large frame. Watching and hearing Laika’s jaws crunch the cat’s bones, and then fail to actually get past the fur to the cat meat (he ends up leaving the body behind), his amateurish hunting reminds us of dogs’ dual nature: genetically dispositioned to live in human society, but capable of the ferociousness of the wild.

Two excurses interrupt the story of Laika’s life on the street, which does have something like a narrative conflict structuring it, as a fight over the cat corpse precipitates a rift between Laika and a fellow stray. The first interruption of this main through line is a tangent about the United States’s use of chimpanzees in their own early space program, an early tragicomic episode that opens the prospect of a wider exploration of humans’ odd ways of exploiting animals but which ends up being something of an extraneous aside. The second consists of rare, often unsettling archival footage of the other dogs the Soviets sent into space for weeks at a time, after outfitting them with surgically implanted feeding tubes (no anesthesia, it seems from the footage) and doggy space-suits so as to avoid Laika’s fate.

Imaginative and playful but drawing us through its play toward darker, too-seldom-considered sides of human and doggy nature, Space Dogs fulfills the implicit cinematic mission of bringing us to places we otherwise could never go. In the novel world it uncovers, the film finds new lines of questioning, if not necessarily answers. When the “hero” dogs were orbiting the Earth, the narrator observes, “No one had wondered what they might have dreamt about in their space capsules.” Speculating about the dreams of other humans is challenging enough. Perhaps we need a kind of intellectual launching pad to reflect on the inner life of what is, after all, an alien form of being. Which is just what Kremer and Peter’s film provides.