First Spaceship on Venus
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Movie Reviews of First Spaceship on Venus
Movie Review: Worth watching
Summary: 4 Stars
Surprisingly good for an old sci fi movie. The budget for the sets wasn't real big, but the whole premise of the movie was entertaining. Worth having for the collection.Movie Review: Who knew that Venus had a chocolatey, gooey center?
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
Movie Review: Multi-Racial Space Adventure in the Sixties!
Summary: 3 Stars
Yeah, that should be the real title of this turkey -- I've read where this is a German/Polish foreign film, 1959. The story happens in the 1980s where we have a space station on the moon and we all live in peaceful harmony, which makes for a boring passage on board this ship. No one is a real hero, and although there are hints of a love triangle, nothing materializes there either.
I did like the take on the Venusians -- a civilization that was on the brink of atomizing the Earth, but something went wrong and they blew themselves up instead. Whew!
Cute little "R2D2" type robot that plays chess but has no heart. He even warns of danger, danger (no Will Robinson here, however).
An international multi-racial team, quite unusual in that time period. At the end, their ship is being subjected to extreme gravity since they accidentally turned back on the atomic whachamacallit (OOPS) -- two guys go back to turn it off and a third comes to rescue them, but then something else goes horribly wrong -- you get the idea.
Special effects are pretty good -- straight-flying rocket, meteor storm (why is there always a meteor storm and a spacewalk in all these??) and so on. Eerie clouds and storms on the formaldehyde surface of Venus...OOOOH>>>
The dubbing was passable and the story plodding along. Rocketship XM was made at about the same time and is the superior scifi. The story is based on the writings of Stanislaus Lem, more noted for the film adaption of his story Solaris. Solaris - Criterion Collection
Rental!
Get more for your money, you B-film fanatics:
First Spaceship On Venus; Widescreen TV.: Greeting Card: Merry Christmas
The DEFA Sci-Fi Collection
Yoko Tani's in these, too:
Samson & the Seven Miracles of the World
My Geisha
Movie Review: Undramatic Parable of Atomic Self-Destruction
Summary: 3 Stars
One of the basic necessities for any film is that it must contain enough of the seeds of human drama and conflict so that the audience will pay attention. In FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS, director Kurt Maetzig provides a visual treat for the eyes but a vacuum where there should have been a sense of community amidst a sense of cinematic awe. Based on a novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, FSV tells of the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia that resulted in the discovery of a spool of data that contained hints of an oncoming attack on Earth from Venus. Eight scientists of various nationalties pilot a craft to Venus in the hopes of averting the holocaust. The problem from a dramatic viewpoint is that screen time is split roughly in an equal manner among the eight thus insuring that the audience gains no sense of differentiation among the crew. The closest that the viewer gets to a personal level is a hint that two of them (One of whom is Yoko Tani, a respected Japanese actress who starred in many German and French sci-fi films) once had an affair. Once the audience sees that any connection to the film must be on a visual level, FSV does not fail to deliver. The special effects for the year (1959) are impressive. There is a scene of a flow of intelligent black goo that envelops the astronauts that is chilling in its intensity. When these astronauts discover that the Venusians self-destructed in the decades prior to the arrival of the Earth craft, it becomes clear that director Maetzig wanted to see FSV as a parable of the immolation inherent in a blind rage to destroy others with nuclear weapons. However, by the film's end, the lack of human connection so dilutes this warning that the film is forced to stand of the wobbly legs of special effects, and whenever any film does this, the results are predictably weakened. FSV then is reduced to a case of what might have been in the hands of better scripting.Movie Review: Three and 1/2 stars for this better-than-average 60s Sci-Fi effort
Summary: 3 Stars
I will confess right off the bat that I saw the movie as part of Mystery Science Theater's famously amusing talk-back-to-the-screen dvd. And I will tell you that this movie wasn't the best choice for them, because it was pretty darn good. There were a few funny jabs, but the MST3K crowd was silent more often than not.
Other reviewers have noted the multi-racial cast. I must admit seeing an African, several Asian, and other presumably third-world actors was what you'd expect to see in 2009, not 1960.
The movie was refreshingly light on the 'horrible, badly-sculpted evil monster threatening the American damsel in distress' films one associates with the 50s and 60s science fiction movie.
The movie wasn't at all predictable. That was novel and welcome. You never see the aliens, because of a plot development that others have pointed out (without, I notice, including a spoiler alert). The crew was realistically puzzled at times, and didn't break out the death ray gun to blast first, and ask questions second, as is all to often in this kind of movie. There was more talk and less action than one is accustomed to.
The special effects are just OK, perhaps better than average for the time period. They don't hold up well compared with today's movies or even television (the effects of the mid- to late- 60 Star Trek were better than seen here), but they get the point across.
Recommended, especially once you get past the anachronistic special effects.