[.ca] First Spaceship on Venus (Widescreen)

From Amazon.com:
In a utopian future of universal peace and brotherhood--1985 to be specific--a mysterious artifact found in Siberia is discovered to be a message from Venus. While the recording is studied, an international team of scientists is rocketed off to make contact with the mysterious planet. It takes the film some time to get going (worldwide harmony makes for a beautiful future but pallid drama when everyone gets along so nicely), but things begin to cook once they land on the misty wasteland of Venus. Swarms of metal bugs hop from glassy mutant trees and bubbling black mud oozes after our astronaut heroes, but no Venusians can be found amidst the geodesic architecture and buzzing power plants. What they discover instead is a terrifying conspiracy wrapped in an anti-war parable. Based on a novel by Polish science fiction legend Stanislaw Lem (whose work also inspired Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris), this German science fiction adventure is a visual treat, from the sleek, grand, silver spaceship and a funky purple Venus landscape of alien ruins and crystalline bubbles. Decently (if prosaically) dubbed and trimmed down to a brisk 78 minutes, it's an entertaining triumph of psychedelic art direction and desolate alien weirdness presented in all its brightly colored, widescreen glory. --Sean Axmaker

You get what you pay for:
NOT as described by Amazon or the jacket - not the 130 minute original but the 78 minute dubbed version shown in the UK. The same poor quality picture (resolution 720 x 480) and sound as the 2000 release but much cheaper. Based on Lem's 1951 first novel The Astronauts the theme is pacifist - compare with the also 1959 "On the Beach". The fuzzy images on the DVD do not do justice to the excellent camerawork and (for the time) special effects. At this price worth getting to compare with US films of the period.

Make Mine Venus!:
Polish science fiction novelist Stanislaw Lem (born 1922) must take pride in the fact that his "Solaris" (1962) has now been twice filmed, first by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and more recently - also less effectively - by an American director whose name escapes me (2003); yet as early as 1960 Lem's first science fiction novel, "The Astronauts" (1952), had already appeared in an adaptation for the silver screen, directed by an East German, Kurt Maetzig. "First Spaceship on Venus" issued, in fact, from a Polish and East German collaboration, with contributions, in the ensemble of players, from three or four "third world" nations. Viewers will recognize Japanese actress Yoko Tani as the sole female crewmember of the space research vessel "Cosmostrator," the titular "First Spaceship" on earth's putative "twin," Venus. This is a mostly superb film, quite magical in its expressionistic special effects. Enticingly for audiences, almost half of the action takes place on Venus amidst sets that do justice to Lem's insistence that alien life will be incomprehensible to humanity. The story, briefly, is this: in 1985 excavations "to irrigate the Gobi Desert" discover extraterrestrial artifacts, one of which, a glassy "spool," contains the last message sent home from a spaceship engaged in reconnoitering the earth. The narration links this fictional incident to the actual 1908 Tunguska meteor impact. The "spool" has sustained damage and yields only a fraction of its contents, but from this bit scientists determine that the visitors originated on Venus, whereupon the "World Space Agency" determines to mount an expedition there. An international crew take command of the "Cosmostrator." The "Cosmostrator" itself demands some attention as one of the most unusual of silver-screen spaceships of the 1950s and 60s: its central silvery cylinder, housing the crew, is surrounded by four similarly hued cylinders of nearly equal dimension housing the engines; the sum of it is a kind of powerful elegance. But the real interest lies in the Venusian scenario itself. Maetzig gives us a shadowy, smoke-and-gas- shrouded landscape full of weird, half-obliterated shapes. One sequence shows the astronauts moving in their "ground cars" through what appears to be a street of melted skyscrapers; there are also huge underground spaces and indecipherable geodesic spheres and cones. The explorers gradually deduce that, on the verge of dousing the earth with radiation preparatory to invading and occupying it, the Venusians destroyed themselves in a fratricidal atomic war. We see the permanently etched shadows of the victims on a blasted wall. In an extremely alien episode, a lake of organic muck chases the terrestrials up the spiral ramp of a half-fused tower, only to retreat mysteriously before catching them fatally at the summit. The visuals elude adequate verbal description. If anyone knew the work of the 1950s and 60s science fiction illustrator Richard Powers, who did paperback covers in a semi-abstract style full of glassy-metallic quasi-biological and quasi-mechanical shapes, that might serve as a good reference. (Samples of Powers' work can be found on-line, should anyone care to go looking.) At the film's finale, in the prototypical Lem-gambit, the Venusians' automated defenses reverse the planet's gravity-field, hurling the "Cosmostrator" back into space, minus two or three unlucky casualties. Despite the Soviet-era utopian bravura, the mission has accomplished but little - the explorers are, in effect, defeated. Between the human and the non-human no genuine communication seems possible, especially where one party has insulated itself behind layers of electronics and automation and is long since a collective suicide. (This story of non-communication comes quite close to the plot of "Solaris," superficial differences notwithstanding - Tarkovsky must surely have known Maetzig's film; he would of course have been familiar with Lem's work beyond "Solaris.") One senses that this English version, with a dubbed soundtrack for American distribution, probably leaves a good many scenes on the cutting-room floor; neither can one tell much about the acting, which, in any case, is of less interest than the strangely realized other world. There is an amusing tracked robot named Omega. The source-print seems well preserved and the format is wide-screen. (A video-tape from a different producer derived from a faded print and cut the image down to television-screen dimensions.) On the strength of the scenic design, this movie should recommend itself to genre aficionados. Anyone who has never seen it is in for a treat.

Who knew that Venus had a chocolatey, gooey center?:
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.

Switch on the emergency gyro:
It is the 1962 view of 1985 (they could have picked 1984). All is right with the world. We discover a rock that contains a spool (what ever a spool is); the spool is discovered to contain a message. And want a message. In 1908 Tunguska (read the facts about this in the book "The Fire Came by: The Riddle of the Great Siberian Explosion" by John Baxter - 1976) a great explosion took place. Evidently this was a space vehicle of extraterrestrial origin. It jettisoned the spool upon exploding. We do not have time to decipher the message do it will have to be deciphered on the way to Venus. Our East German space ship rivals those of Japanese sci-fi with one exception. This ship has an emergency Gyro that can only be activated by using a special hammer to break the glass. Mean time what will we find on Venus and will it destroy or carry a message to all mankind.

Finally, a widescreen version:
I bet I've watched this movie 20 times over the last 10 years between my old VHS copy and later Diamond Entertainment DVD version. I can't explain why, but I love this movie. It's the perfect lay in bed and doze-off-to movie. My recommendation: skip the Diamond fullscreen DVD version (which doesn't have any better quality than VHS tape) and go for the Image version. The only advantage the Diamond DVD has is that it's a double feature with "Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet", an almost decent dozer. I won't go into the plot or details since other reviews have. I can only say that this is an entirely enjoyable movie for classic sci-fi fans.