BONUS BLOG -- 1976: IN THE DUST OF THE STARS

What’s it about?

A space-faring civilization sends a rocket mission in response to a distress signal from an unexplored planet. Arriving several years after the signal was sent, the crew lands safely on a strange and seemingly peaceful planet, but only after some emergency maneuvers during landing. After attending a party thrown by the local leader, most of the crew is strangely in favor of just leaving and starting the years long journey back to their home.

The sole member of the crew who stayed home from the party begins to suspect that there are some mind control shenanigans at work. He takes a probe out to investigate, and luckily discovers a shaft leading down underground -- where it is quickly apparent that an entire race of people is enslaved. It was these slaves who sent the distress signal, but it seems unlikely the small crew of the rocket can help them much -- especially after one of them is captured and tortured by the oppressive surface dwellers.

Is it any good?

This is a pretty unremarkable sci-fi flick, so I wasn’t originally planning to write about it. But it was produced by a Soviet bloc country (the third one I’ve seen from East Germany so far) and that alone should be worth remarking on. So I figured there’d be no harm in doing a short write-up and trying to find something to talk about.

IN THE DUST OF THE STARS feels like an extended episode of STAR TREK. A rocket crew lands on a planet and encounters a mystery, some cajoling, some deception, some threats, a horrible secret, and then some violence. The movie isn’t all that long, and there are some weird interludes that feel like padding (such as a lengthy nude dance by one of the mentally blocked crew members), so it’s easy to imagine the whole thing cut down to forty-five minutes.

I’m always kind of confused when I run across sci-fi movies like this. I expect science fiction movies to be “big” in some way. The bigness is often literal -- giant monsters always give a feeling of grandeur to things. Or the bigness can simply be that the entire Earth is threatened by destruction, or that there is some appropriately expansive theme or spectacle playing out. Of course, there are plenty of small science fiction stories -- they don’t all have to be epic. But I suppose I feel like these kind of small mysteries are more “television sized” for some reason.

Part of the reason for the small feeling here is that the story is set in some completely made-up galaxy and Earth is never mentioned at all. Both the planet where the rocket comes from and the one where it lands are made-up sci-fi worlds. There’s no sense that any of this will ever affect the Earth at all -- and not even any sense that the races in question are related to or descended from Earth folks. (Everyone does look 100% human though.)

I’m sure that using completely fantastical settings was the safest way to make sci-fi in the Soviet bloc. Talking about real nations would mean following the party line (whatever it might be that day), but putting your action on some distant world with no relation to Earth would help isolate the film makers from any criticism or repercussions if they did want to say anything subversive. On the other hand, IN THE DUST OF THE STARS is not really subversive of anything at all. The anti-slavery message is one that works equally well in communist and western societies. (These aren’t metaphorical wage-slaves after all. They are just the normal chain gang kind that everybody objects to.) There’s some disapproval of decadent lifestyles as well, which hardly seems like it would be controversial on groundbreaking on either side of the Iron Curtain. The harmless clowning in IVAN VASIELIVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE (1973) seems more likely to subvert the party than anything in this movie.

Things do get a bit “bigger” towards the end of the movie. The dilemma that the rocket crew finds themselves in is pretty interesting, though it’s not exactly spelled out. The crew consists of four women and two men, and obviously their numbers are not enough to do much against the entrenched aristocracy. The captain believes that they are honor-bound to stay and help the slaves resist their captors -- even though it will take many years (or generations) until they can be free again. The rest of the crew doesn’t believe they have any such obligation. This is a question worth wrestling over, and the movie doesn’t deliver any easy answers in the end.

There’s also a bit of appealing weirdness about the movie. The alien party is both futuristic and hedonistic -- the better to seduce the straight-arrow crew members, I suppose. And weird bits like the long nude dance I alluded to before actually add a bit of an off-balance feeling to the movie. So even though the plot could probably be compressed into television size, some of the atmosphere would probably be lost along the way. Still, if anybody is actually interested in Soviet bloc sci-fi movies, I would recommend THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967), EOLOMEA (1972), and SOLYARIS (1972) before you even think about watching this one.

1972: EOLOMEA

What’s it about?

After a spate of mysterious rocket disappearances, a scientist petitions for the cessation of all space travel until the problem is solved. Reluctantly, the council in charge of such things agrees, and those serving on distant space outposts are consequently temporarily stranded. Two such men in particular find themselves chafing under the travel ban -- one because he is yearning to head back to Earth and the other because his son is among those who are reported missing.

After sulking for a bit, the two decide to violate the travel ban and visit their nearest neighbor at the next outpost. They can’t get too close since he has contracted a deadly space disease (possibly from strange shadow-like creatures indigenous to the asteroid he’s stationed on), but he gives them a capsule that he says someone will be along to claim later. Meanwhile, the scientist on Earth quizzes one of her colleagues who appears to know more about the disappearances than he’s letting on. But the mystery isn’t solved until the scientist travels into space herself, and the various pieces of the puzzle all start to come together.

Is it any good?

EOLOMEA was produced by the same East German studio that put out THE SILENT STAR (1960), but besides that connection I didn’t know anything about it before I watched it. I was watching it online (which is why there are no screenshots), and I figured I’d get through the boring beginning bits and come back to the rest of it later. But it seems that the East Germans learned a lot about movie pacing since 1960. There are no boring beginning bits with this movie -- things started off interesting with the disappearance of several rockets and never let up for the next eighty minutes.

One of the neatest things about EOLOMEA is the complex system of space exploration that it seems to take for granted. I don’t know how far in the future the movie is supposed to be set, but there are apparently several space flights each day -- many of them between space stations on other planets or asteroids. In fact, at least one of the characters in the movie has never even been on Earth, so this bustling space traffic has been in place for at least a generation.

Most of the view the audience has into this brave new world is on the dull and poorly trafficked fringes, however. The two men stationed out there are pilot and navigator for what is essentially the rocket version of a delivery truck. Unlike in THE SILENT STAR, the characters here actually have interesting back stories and real emotions. The pilot, for instance, was one of the first people to help colonize space. But at some point he was involved in a deadly accident and everyone on his rocket died except himself and some children. His wife died in the accident, but his son survived. That was decades ago, though, and he hasn’t seen his son since then. When the travel ban is put in place, the pilot is waiting for his son to visit.

The main characters all mostly have stories as well realized as that one -- and they are all interconnected in ways that feel organic. It’s easy to imagine that people involved in the space program would have varying relationships with each other, depending on what jobs they had. So when we learn that one character knows another, it doesn’t seem out of place. And that definitely helps the story, since all the various strands eventually come together. The movie is primarily a mystery (but with very strong sci-fi overtones, of course) and it’s always clear that the disappearance of the rockets is not exactly what it seems.

But even before the different strands get tied together, there’s plenty to be interested in. The sick fellow at the other outpost, for instance, doesn’t seem important in his own right at first. I figured he would end up just being an excuse to get the other two off their asteroid and into an unapproved flight, but even so I wanted to know more about him. Because of his sickness, he only communicates with the others through his spacesuit. And his theories and descriptions of the aliens he believes he contracted the sickness from are the kind of charming diversions that add color to sci-fi stories. The film makers could easily have given him a mundane sickness, but instead they deliver a tantalizing half-explanation of an alien disease.

There’s another similar scene with a robot later in the movie. The robot has information that the characters believe they need to save lives, but the robot has been ordered not to tell. This creates tension in its programming since the robot is also not supposed to cause harm to humans. People have been mining this exact same sci-fi situation since Isaac Asimov first laid out his three laws of robotics, so there’s no points for originality. In fact, the robot’s dilemma here is far less interesting than HAL-9000's in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). But it’s presented pretty convincingly (in every detail except the appearance of the robot) and is refreshingly more of a momentary inconvenience than a major plot point.

THE SILENT STAR had a lot of this little business in the margins too, and I liked a lot of the ideas floating around in that movie. But EOLOMEA has far more interesting characters, a tighter story, and some improvements in the special effects. All in all, this is a neat little sci-fi mystery with a pretty satisfying ending. There’s also a surprising lack of any kind of obvious political agenda. No specific countries are mentioned at all (though some characters do have ethnic names) and neither are any real historical events except Yuri Gagarin’s space flights. Not only are there no diatribes against warmongering capitalists (another weakness of THE SILENT STAR), but the characters aren’t even all necessarily happy and productive members of society. The two guys in the outpost are bored with their jobs, disobey orders, and get drunk while ostensibly on duty. Meanwhile, the ending of the movie suggests that sometimes the best way to serve mankind is to take initiative and act outside the established chain of command. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that this was produced by a Soviet bloc country, I never would have guessed it.



What else happened this year?

-- Bruce Dern saves the last surviving forest from short-sighted politicians and public apathy in SILENT RUNNING. The movie also features three awesome robots, a folk soundtrack by Joan Baez, and some of Dern’s best crazy-man acting.
-- Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky adapts Stanislaw Lem’s classic novel SOLYARIS, but focuses more on the human relationships than the sci-fi bits. I like this version better than Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 adaptation, but neither movie is anywhere near as good as the book.
-- In other literary adaptations, there’s also a version of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE starring absolutely nobody you have heard of (the most famous name is Valerie Perrine) but which is still pretty good nonetheless. I never read the book though, so I don’t know how it compares to the Vonnegut/imagination version.
-- Christopher Walken almost single-handedly turns THE MIND SNATCHERS into a pretty interesting character study of a sociopath fighting to save his identity from a new form of electroshock therapy.
-- Meanwhile, Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin try to have a baby in a world where getting pregnant is a capital crime in ZPG: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH.
-- Roddy MacDowell leads a monkey uprising in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, moving the series a big step closer to a world where talking apes rule over humans.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1972...

I’m a big fan of SILENT RUNNING so I think I have to tell you to watch that one.

1960: THE SILENT STAR

What’s it about?

A newly discovered alien artifact linked to the Tunguska meteorite explosion of 1908 appears to be a recording in an unknown language from an exploded spaceship. Although enough of the recording is deciphered to determine that the spaceship originated in Venus, most of the message remains a mystery -- and Venus itself stays strangely silent despite repeated attempts at contacting the inhabitants by radio. A multinational expedition is quickly mounted, incorporating crew members from all the great countries of the Earth: the Soviet Union, East Germany, the United States, Japan, China, India, Poland, and of course the nation of Africa.

While en route to Venus, the scientists continue trying to decipher the remainder of the alien message while dodging the usual perils of space travel (i.e., incredibly boring meteor storms). It’s only once the rocket has moved beyond radio range with Earth that they realize the message was not intended for humans at all -- instead, it’s a report on the feasibility of an invasion of Earth. Several decades have passed since the recording was made, so the crew decides to press on with their mission and make peace with Venus if a threat still exists. Attempts to contact the planet still yield no results and even in orbit the thick cloud cover makes it impossible to see the surface, so the crew decides to land and contact the inhabitants of Venus in person.




Is it any good?

THE SILENT STAR is very much like a socialist version of DESTINATION MOON (1950) or FLIGHT TO MARS (1951) -- much of the movie is taken up by the mounting of the interplanetary expedition and the resulting trip through space. The intervening ten years have made a bit of a difference, however. Although the rocket is still an impractically cavernous movie rocket, the details of the space voyage ring a little truer. The astronauts wear uniforms and spacesuits not too different from those that real cosmonauts wore, they eat liquified food, they rely largely on computers for navigation and control, and so on. On the other hand, those extra ten years also serve to emphasize just how creaky some of the plot contrivances of the space flight are. There is the usual meteor storm and the usual space walk to repair the damage, but THE SILENT STAR really seems to just be going through the paces as none of it is especially exciting or suspenseful or even important to the plot.

The sets, costumes, props, and sci-fi designs are all very nifty. Venus especially has a compellingly weird look, like a landscape illustration out of a Dr Seuss book. And the interior of the rocket itself probably has more in common with later spaceships like STAR TREK’s Enterprise than with the clunky submarine-inspired rockets of earlier sci-fi flicks. The music used over the opening credits was also very promising and raised my hopes for some weird sound design. It reminded me a little bit of the otherworldly score for PLANET OF THE APES, but unfortunately I can’t really say I noticed any music at all after the movie started. The action sequences also leave a lot to be desired. As soon as something ostensibly exciting starts happening, the special effects sputter out -- this is most obvious during the meteor storm when the cosmonauts are thrown about in high speed, so the sequence feels just a few bars of “Yakety Sax” away from a Benny Hill chase scene.




Another downfall of THE SILENT STAR is the dialogue. The movie starts with a long section of expository narration -- and, in fact, the exposition and explanation continues via news reports and character monologues for almost the first half hour. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima by the U.S. is also referenced repeatedly and figures in the back stories of two characters. (One is an American scientist who regrets he helped build the bomb. The other is a Japanese woman whose mother was killed in the attack on Hiroshima.) It does seem a little unsporting for the movie to pay lip service to multinational cooperation, but then also to continuously remind viewers that the U.S. is full of decadent war mongers. But then it’s a Soviet bloc production, so I’d probably be more disappointed if it didn’t have at least some party-approved propaganda. As far as the whole movie goes, I guess my final judgment is that there are a lot of “things to look at” in THE SILENT STAR (e.g., a super-computer, a chess-playing robot, some neat Venutian technology, a cool rocket), but not a whole lot else that is too interesting. The characters, the themes, the dialogue, and the action are all pretty simplistic. I’m not sorry I saw it, but it’s really more historically and culturally curious than enjoyable.

There is also an English-dubbed version of this movie which was released internationally in the sixties that goes by the name THE FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS. I watched about half an hour of that version as well, and though it’s essentially the same story, a lot of footage was cut from the beginning of the film. (Some characters also got new western-friendly nationalities -- for instance, the Polish robotics expert is French instead.) This not only removes most of the criticism of America, but also tightens up the pacing in that section. In the German-language version, much of the first half hour is facile politicking, and it’s really no loss to see it excised. But the English-language version also cuts much of the cosmonaut back stories as well. While most of that is no great loss either, there are some neat scenes that get lost (like one where two of the crew members take time to sit down in a field and appreciate the solidity of the Earth before blast off), as well as some really great mountain scenery that any cough drop commercial would kill for.




What else happened this year?

-- Roger Corman produced and directed the comedy/horror/sci-fi movie THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (emphasis on comedy) about a man-eating, talking potted plant named Audrey Jr. Though filmed in only two days on a minuscule budget, it eventually inspired a stage musical which had its own movie adaptation starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin in 1986.
-- Taking place in an alternate timeline where Britain somehow leads the space race, THE MAN IN THE MOON follows the adventures of a normal guy who becomes the number one candidate for a trip to the moon thanks to his amazing ability to shrug off stress. Hijinks ensue, many of them involving astronaut training equipment of dubious utility.
-- The French sort-of-horror, sort-of-sci-fi flick EYES WITHOUT A FACE follows a monomaniacal doctor as he attempts to graft a new face on his disfigured daughter’s skull with the usual disastrous consequences.
-- Apparently alien telepathic children coexist uneasily with the rest of the inhabitants of a small English town in VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. The movie is adapted from a John Wyndham novel called THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS.
-- Fritz Lang returned to one of his most diabolical characters in THE 1,000 EYES OF DR MABUSE. The ensuing Mabuse revival ran through the early sixties and made the telepathic hypnotist a villain on par with classic monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein. (But only in parts of Europe.)

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1960...

This is a tough one. I’d say that every movie in the list above (including THE SILENT STAR) is pretty good in its own way, but I don’t think that any of them are necessarily great. My advice would be to watch whichever one sounds most interesting to you, but if you just want an enjoyable sci-fi movie then I’d say go with either VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED or THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS.