Cosmoball imagines a near future in which the fate of Earth is decided not on a battlefield but on a playing field suspended in orbit, where humans and aliens compete in a sport that looks like nothing played on the ground.
What is Cosmoball about?
A colossal alien vessel hangs over the planet, and inside it a game is broadcast to a watching world. Earth's side is a small, quarrelsome team of players with abilities far beyond the ordinary, and they are losing more than matches: the honour of their home world is at stake each time they take the field. Into this arrives a young man who has never asked for power but carries a great deal of it, from a source nobody can name. He agrees to play for one reason only, a promised cure for his gravely ill mother. What begins as a bargain becomes something larger, because the tournament turns out to be a front for a danger that threatens the entire galaxy, and the four players from Earth must decide whether they are athletes, soldiers, or something the universe has been waiting for.
About the cast
Evgeny Romantsov leads a young ensemble that includes Mariya Lisovaya, Victoria Agalakova and Ivan Ivanovich, with veteran Russian actor Evgeny Mironov among the supporting players. Elizaveta Taychenacheva, Yuliya Vinc and Hristina Blokhina round out a cast that leans heavily on physical performance, since much of the film takes place in zero-gravity arenas rendered through extensive visual effects.
Context & significance
Director Dzhanik Fayziev built Cosmoball as one of Russia's more ambitious attempts at a homegrown superhero and sports-fantasy hybrid, released in 2020 with a runtime of just under two hours. The premise deliberately borrows the shape of a team-sports story, with underdogs, rivalries and a rookie who has to earn his place, and then relocates it into a science-fiction setting of alien spectators and orbital stadiums. Its reception on release was lukewarm, with viewers divided over its effects-heavy approach, but it remains a rare example of large-scale Russian genre cinema that tries to invent its own mythology rather than adapt an existing one.
Watching Cosmoball on Ktime
Cosmoball streams on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so families can choose whichever suits the room. Log in with a free K-Time account to start watching; the interface is available in Farsi, and this page is free to browse whether or not you are signed in.