First Spaceship On Venus (1959) [Import]

First Spaceship on Venus provides us with this critical piece of advice - if you go to another planet and find yourself closely pursued by black goo, don't shoot it - not unless you want something really bad to happen to Earth, at least. You have to admire the optimism of these filmmakers, though, as they -from their 1962 perspective - imagined that in 1985 the world would be a pretty happy place where people wore great big letters of the alphabet on their shirts for some insane reason, where a moon base would already have been established, and where scientists from all countries worked together to send a spaceship to Venus. Why Venus? A strange metallic object has been discovered; scientists have concluded it came from the famous Tunguska Event of 1908 and is nothing less than a spool containing a message from another planet - a planet which, given the trajectory of the object that exploded over Siberia all those years ago, had to be Venus. Lickety-split, it's up, up, and away to Venus, as Earth seeks its first contact with an alien race.

Things start to go a little downhill when the grouchy scientist from India interprets the mystery spool and learns it details a plan of attack on Earth by the Venusians. Of course, there's also the obligatory meteorite-dodging scene that has to play out. Undaunted, though, our international crew of a half dozen men and one woman (someone had to serve the nutritious liquid beverages, I guess) sporting exceedingly ridiculous spacesuits (leisure suits for space, I would call them, complemented by banana suits for takeoffs and landings) continue their mission to Venus. The landing mission doesn't go so well, either.

There's really no chemistry between the crewmembers, not even between the man and woman who supposedly had some kind of relationship in the past. The crew commander is interesting, though, because his hair seems to grow taller as the movie progresses and he also seems to experience some sort of German silent expressionist film flashbacks from time to time. Frankly, I didn't really care who made it back and who didn't, and Venus itself turned out to be less interesting than the interior of the boring ship (where chess games were the highlight of space life).

First Spaceship on Venus does at least attempt to be a serious science fiction movie, but at its heart it is yet another anti-nuclear film of the early 1960s. Frankly, I would not have tried to make a point at the end of the film because, all told, the whole thing was rather pointless to begin with.

First Spaceship On Venus was recommended to me and I decided to take a chance. Fortunately it was dubbed in English. The film is based on a 1951 novel called The Astronauts by Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem.

Lets get the quibbles out of the way first. This is unmistakenly an early '60s era work and dubbed (perhaps a bit clumsily) into English. By that you can't escape the crudity of some of the f/x and some of the dialogue can be a bit clunky. And besides the dated aspects of f/x and dialogue you have to try to forget what you already know about what Venus is really like.

Now for the good stuff. In its own right this was an ambitious movie. It's a story of pure space exploration or more particularly exploration of a strange new world. And the depiction of that world might be a touch crude but it is nonetheless imaginative and fascinating. An alien artifact is found on Earth and its origin is traced back to Venus. In the peaceful Earth of 1985(!!!) an international group of scientists and specialists man the advanced spaceship Cosmostrator to travel to Venus to investigate and possibly make contact with any alien intelligence to be found.

Some of the imaginative set designs and models could have been lifted right off the covers of some of the most romanticised SF novels. I love the design of the Cosmostrator and the ship's control deck bears a striking conceptual similarity to the bridge of Star Trek's starship Enterprise, yet the film came out six years before Star Trek aired on American television! The film also features an intelligent yet non humanoid robot called Omega. And the crew is genuinely interracial. The ship's commander is German or perhaps Polish. The communications specialist is African. The ship's physician is a Japanese woman. And the two chief scientists are Indian and Chinese. Plus they all have authentic ethnic names. While Forbidden Planet is recognized for likely greatly influencing Gene Roddenberry in developing Star Trek this film introduces ideas that Roddenberry couldn't have gotten from Forbidden Planet such as the interracial crew. And could Matt Jefferies have been influenced by this film when designing the starship Enterprise bridge? I can't answer either question but it can make you wonder.

I'm normally not keen on films that are dubbed into English, but I have to say that this film caught my attention right off and held me to the end. Because in the final assessment the good outweighs the bad.

An adaptation of one of Stanislaw Lem's novels... it's going to be good, right? Sadly, no.

Instead, "First Spaceship To Venus -- a poorly dubbed, severely-cut version of the German/Polish film "Der schweigende Stern" -- ends up being a very long, dull sci-fi movie that is difficult to pay attention to for any length of time. Wooden acting, a ponderous script and a general air of pretention... no wonder Lem disowned it.

The year is 1985 (as imagined in 1960), and a mysterious message is found in the Gobi Desert, which apparently came from the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. I may not be an expert in geography, but I'm pretty sure that's impossible. So scientists somehow figure out that the messages came from the planet Venus (I guess they didn't know about the acid rain and toxic atmosphere then) and that the Tunguska "meteor" was actually a spaceship that crashed.

So while an Indian scientist tries to decode the message, an international crew is assembled to go to Venus aboard the Cosmokrator. But of course, it's discovered that the Venusians want to kill all of humanity and steal our planet (presumably because it's so much nicer and less toxic than theirs) -- and the danger hasn't gone with them.

I tried. I really did. But I simply could not pay attention for very long while watching "First Spaceship to Venus" -- and unfortunately, I don't think that the cut footage would have improved matters. There are some promising moments in the story, mostly centering around the creepy Venusian landscape and the automated machines left behind.

But despite the promise, the movie just sort of oozes along, peppered with incredibly naive viewpoints on war (one guy pompously announces that nobody on Earth will panic if told "The Venusians want to kill us all!"?). The dialogue is leaden ("We are all fascinated by the petrified forest," said in a dead voice), and too much time is spent on a cutesy robot playing chess. And there are some gaping plot holes -- there's a guy with air leaking out of his spacesuit... and everybody tries to keep him TALKING which would waste even more oxygen.

And unfortunately none of the actors are very good -- there's a lame attempt at character depth by pairing Yoko Tani's melodramatic doctor with Günther Simon's woodenly heroic pilot, but we never know much about their past romance. Honestly, the only character who was in any way endearing is Tang Hua-Ta's Chinese linguist, mainly because he's played by one of the few competent actors. As for the dubbing... it's awful. Simply awful.

"First Spaceship on Venus" has impressive (for its time) special effects and some interesting action, but it also has a sluggish pace and wooden acting. Sometimes a curiosity, but it's pretty boring.