Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
great film treated badly, November 8, 1999
By A Customer
This is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi films. Produced in GERMANY in 1959. Ahead of it's time on many levels. An INTERNATIONAL crew on board a spaceship, seven years before Star Trek in '66. Outstanding special effects, much more ambitious than anything else being produced at the time. Compare this with "Rocketship X-M" done the same year. I'd pay good money to see the original film letterboxed and subtitled. Unfortunately, the version distibuted in the U.S. is poorly dubbed and the soundtrack is made up of bad stock music, some you might recognize from old terry-toon cartoons. (shudder) On the plus side, it has great visual concepts, unique art direction and fantasic sets. The spaceship Kosmostrator, is a beautiful ship design, looking as functional and futuristic now, as it did then. Lemme tell ya kids, this film played GREAT in the theatre, and it's still one of my favorites.
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27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Make Mine Venus!, April 9, 2003
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.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
You get what you pay for, May 4, 2004
By A Customer
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.
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