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Der Schweigende Stern
First Spaceship on Venus
Raumschiff Venus antwortet nicht / Spaceship Venus does not Reply
East Germany/Poland 1960
produced by DEFA, Zespol Filmowy Iluzjon
directed by Kurt Maetzig
starring Yoko Tani, Oldrich Lukes, Ignacy Machowski, Julius Ongewe, Michail N.Postnikow, Kurt Rackelmann, Günther Simon, Tang Hua-Ta, Lucyna Winnicka, Eduard von Winterstein, Ruth-Maria Kubitschek, Eva-Maria Hagen, Fritz Decho, Gertraud Kreissig, Werner Senftleben, Nico Turoff
screenplay by Wofgang Kohlhaase, Günter Reisch, Kurt Maetzig, Jan Fethke, Günther Rücker, Alexander Stenbock-Fermor, based on the novel Astronauci by Stanislaw Lem, music by Andrzej Markowski
review by Mike Haberfelner
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1985: Earth scientists find out that the thing that has hit earth
decades ago was not a meteor after all but a Venusian spaceship, and when
decyphering the Venusian on-board recordings, it soon becomes clear that
the extraterrestrials came to earth to conquer. Thus a mission to Mars
is rescheduled for Venus and an eight-headed team (Yoko Tani, Oldrich
Lukes, Ignacy Machowski, Julius Ongewe, Michail N.Postnikow, Kurt
Rackelmann, Günther Simon, Tang Hua-Ta) from all nations (including the
USA and Japan I might add) embarks on a mission to outer space that
runs into some of the usual troubles - including meteor storms and such -
before arriving on Venus, a barren and unexpectedly uninhabited planet
with an atmosphere hostile to humans and high radiation levels.
Eventually, our heroes find a (dead) Venusian city and come to the
conclusion that the Venusian population must have exterminated itself in a
terrible nuclear war - and the repercussions of this war are even felt
today, as some kind of nuclear swamp almost eats away the astronauts, and
they manage to escape the planet only in the very last moment.
While
in USA in the 1950's and early 60's, science fiction was targeted entirely
at the kiddy- and teenage crowd, Eastern Europe took a more sombre and
more adult approach to the genre, as witnessed in First Spaceship to
Venus, an intelligent space opera with a world peace message based on
a book by Stanislaw Lem, one of the science fiction authors of his
time. However, despite an intelligent script and quite impressive (at
least for its time) special effects, the film as a whole is less than
perfect: The characterisations of no less than eight lead characters is at
best rudimentary and quite a bit clichéd, the storytelling every now and
again seriously lacks action and drifts off a bit into boring terrain, and
some of the film's subplots are left largely unexplored after being
introduced at random points (like giving the ship's robot a heart). Still,
totally watchable as a piece of slightly different science fiction
that still carries at least of some significance nowadays.
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