We have a science fiction film that stuck between to cinema Eras. The more Carefree, flamboyant and colourful 1950s with its emphasis on the bazaar. Juxtapose to the soon to be more popular introspective serious and thought-provoking space operas of the late 60s and early 1970s.
Sadly it becomes problematic with this film as time goes on. There's a glorious part about two ways in where our two genres mixed together incredibly well.
The slow atmospheric build up of two men travelling deep space on their way to a alien objective with contemporary classical music and an overall sense of atmosphere.
But intermixed with all the colour and technological equipment of the late 50s cinematic b-movies.
In a way the film feels like it wants to go one of two directions. Either have your typical space exploration story where they encounter a strange alien world and have to deal with whatever problems arise from that or they want to look at is kind of introspective story of man's travel through the cosmos and dealing with psychiatric problems.
With the internal negligence that comes along with corporate oversight on a scientific Expedition.
But the movie can't decide and therefore we get little bits of both. And it results in this ridiculous story
Involving the discovery of a counter Earth on the opposite side of the solar system.
This leads to a research team being sent to investigate the anomaly. But a problem arises. After 3 weeks in cryosleep the team crash lands on the mysterious planet and are rescued by what we later discovered to be Mongolians*
They wake up in the medical Bay which is located within the facility from which they launched.
Everyone around them is both confused and angry thinking that the astronauts had only been out for three weeks and at some point decided to turn their ship around and head back home.
A point I found confusing given how were they supposed to wake up halfway through their journey to then turn their ship around to return?
But that part of the story is never brought up.
Instead we get a slew of angry people trying to figure out if these astronauts are on the level or if they had done something mysterious wile out in their journey.
I thought this was going to link up to this weird Espionage story that happened at the beginning of the movie. Where this guy was trying to steal secret information from the European space agency.
But that whole part of the story is dropped and I have no idea why it's in this story at all.
It was all leading up to a perfectly serviceable plot twist in where an enemy combatant or a competing space station had gotten to the planet first and then rescued the American\European space pilots when they crash landed on the secret Planet.
I thought there'd be this whole secondary story about how the opposing space agency invented some sort of warp technology that could get their ships to and from the two planets in less than a couple of hours which would explain for the mysterious space voyage that only took half the time.
But instead we're informed that this planet is a doppelganger of the other Earth and that there two exact same planets coexisting at the exact same time.
Which creates its own problem as you would think the two ships flying to the other planet would inevitably crash into each other as they're making their Voyage from their original destination.
Maybe I'm digging a little too deep into the story with secondary and tertiary story elements but the overall film doesn't give us much. We get a montage of the two pilots training for their Adventure but otherwise there's not a lot of character development.
Everyone's just kind of they're doing their own thing and working through the case.
You don't give connected to anybody outside of the two pilots and even then one of our main Pilots practically disappears about two-thirds of the way in. Mainly because he's too injured from the ship crash.
Conclusion: This film is really good when you look at the individual aspects of it.
It's got some really nice special effects, fantastic set designs and the acting is okay. But overall when everything is put together it just doesn't really work out.
It starts out strong enough.
There's this weird spy plot and an internal revenue problem as the space agency tries to fund the space expedition to this new planet and I thought the two plots were going to intermix at some point and create a whole new story involving rival Industries.
But it just turns into this weird mystery plot involving confused Pilots, angry managers and a doppelganger plot that comes out of nowhere.
After all of this I decided just to stare at the poster for the movie for a couple of seconds and it literally reveals half of the plot.
It just shows the two different Earths.
Maybe if I wasn't a complete idiot I would have gone into this movie knowing the possible plot twist. And I probably would have enjoyed it more. But given that I was kind of blind going into this as I just choose random movies by name sometimes and decide 'I'm going to watch this without looking anything up.'
*The Mongolian space suits are hilarious. These fish looking scuba outfits with these ridiculous looking yellow alien head things. And I'm of two minds when I look at these stupid suits.
One is that they were trying to throw us for a loop by pretending these were strange alien creatures who are then revealed to be humans, but the other part of me thinks this is just what Americans assumed Mongolians would wear as space suits. They're ''obviously'' so disconnected from American and British engineering. Or maybe it's a dig at how silly they think Communists look they whenever they go to space.
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