In keeping with last night's Venusian theme, our selection this evening was a film called "First Spaceship on Venus"(1960), the story of an international mission to that planet, in search of an Alien Race that has threatened to blow Earth to Kingdom Come. The movie was made East Germany of all places. That in itself is a first for me. I've never seen an East German film before, I didn't even know they had a movie industry, poor as they were and under the Soviets' thumb. IMDB says it's a co-production between Poland and East Germany, but really I think you can translate that into "it was funded by Russia". What is interesting, once again - because we saw this with the Soviet-made "Battle Beyond The Sun" - is the portrayal in favor of peace between nations. Here in America, we were always told that the Russkies wanted to bomb us into the Stone Age. People my age remember "drop drills" in Elementary School, where your teacher would call out "drop"!......in the middle of class, and all the kids would dive under their desks, as a rehearsal for the eventuality of the real thing. But in two movies we've seen recently, including tonight's picture, we see the Russians, by East German proxy, promoting brotherhood and peace. What gives?
We have a multinational cast, featuring actors from Austria, Japan, Poland and Africa, among others. So again, we see that the Iron Curtain was not as isolated as we were told. I'm not naive; I know the deadly downsides of Communism, but in retrospect I think we in America were getting a dose of the same kind of propaganda from our own government that we accused the Russians of using to "brainwash" their own people. What we see here is a fairly big production, with advanced special effects for 1960 (infliuenced by George Pal), and costly sets. The movie also has a big name screenwriter : the legendary science fiction author Stanislaw Lem, who also wrote "Solaris", which Tarkovsky turned into a masterpiece. I wish the same could be said in this case, but unfortunately, two problems are immediately apparent. One is the dubbing. I don't know if the dialogue in the original version was all in German, which would have required the disparate foreign actors to be fluent in that language, or if everyone just spoke in their native tongues and the filmmakers dubbed it in German. At any rate, in the U.S. version, the whole thing is dubbed in English, naturally, and it looks horrible because it doesn't come close to matching the actors' mouths. The second problem is the actors themselves. "Stiff" doesn't begin to cover it. Where's John Agar when you need him? Somebody (The Politburo, probably) spent a lot of dough on this flick, the least they could have done is get some decent thespians to play it out.
Here's the plot in a nutshell : Have you ever heard of the Tunguska Event? It was a Huge (pronounced Hyooge) Blast that leveled almost 800 square miles of forest in Siberia in 1908. The blast was the equivalent of 15 megatons of TNT, and the theory has always been that it was caused by a meteor. But now we know different, because according to the movie, when search teams canvased the area after the explosion, instead of discovering the remnant of a fireball, they found an Alien Artifact, theorized to be a missile of some sort. Among the wreckage was a spool containing what became known to Russian Scientists as The Cosmic Message. It boiled down to this : "Hello, Earthlings. We are the people of Venus and we have the technology to blow you to smithereens, as you have just witnessed by the present detonation. Surrender now before we destroy your entire planet".
This is the reason for the International Space Mission, to fly to Venus, find their Interplanetary Missile Launching Facility and demolish it before those S.O.Bs can send another one flying in our direction. The crew are traveling in a pretty awesome spaceship with a cool name : The Cosmostrator. They like saying it over and over again, as you can hear for yourself during scenes on the flight deck. You can have a look at The Cosmostrator by Googling it. Lem also came up with catchy names for the onboard helicopter and a one-man vehicle, neither of which I can recall now but those are worth searching for too, or just watch the movie.
When the team gets to Venus, they discover a Giant Electrical Cable under the surface of the planet, which, if dug up and followed, will lead them to the Atomic Power Plant attached to the launch facility. To get there they have to cross all kinds of dangerous alien landscapes, one filled with hopping mechanical bugs. These scenes are the best parts of the movie. The sets of the Venusian Otherworld are awesome looking and very imaginitive, like something out of an alien Alice In Wonderland. Strange wispy clouds float over fields of long, horn-shaped creatures resembling sea anemones. The effect of the cloud overlay gives the setting a three dimensional look, and I should also note that this is one case where the use of color in a sci-fi film was mandatory. Venus looks phantasmagorical in purple and pink hues. This is another film that needs to be restored so that modern fans can see these sets as they were intended to be seen. The Youtube print is soft and slightly washed out, I might've liked the movie better if it was razor sharp. However, there's no getting around the godawful acting and the dubbing. Because of those factors I can't give "First Spaceship On Venus" a passing grade. At best, I can go One and One Half Thumbs because of the incredible sets (and The Cosmostrator!), but unless you're a diehard fan of East German science fiction movies, I'm afraid I can't recommend it. /////
Just a brief review tonight because of time constraints. The next blog will be back to normal. See you in about five minutes at the Usual Time! :)
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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