Ikarie XB-1(1963 movie)Well, this movie was definitely ... different. Sort of. It's very representative of sci-fi from the 1960s, which is to say it's all about the wonders of space and how awesome it would be to explore it. Actually comparisons to
Star Trek would be fairly apt, but I'll get into that later. The reason I'm writing this review isn't because I especially liked or disliked it, but because I feel it's important more people should know about this movie. Why? Because it was made in Czechoslovakia back in the 1960s, and it's a movie not many people seem to know about. I sure as hell had never heard of it, and it's only by chance that I happened to see it on a list of obscure sci-fi.
As I said, as far as sci-fis in the 1960s went, this is fairly representative of other movies of that decade. Much like
Star Trek, it follows a crew of explorers from many different countries on the most advanced ship Earth has developed, the starship
Ikarie XB-1. Their mission – head to the Alpha Centauri system and check out a mysterious "white planet" which they suspect might have intelligent life on it. The ship is fairly small, so its crew is rather small, though they seem to enjoy rather spacious interiors in which they can partake in rather quaint recreation (by today's standards) of ballroom dancing. Of note is the inclusion of women, but since this was still the '60s, they didn't do a whole lot outside of being romantic interests and/or serving as a moral voice of reason at times. The voyage itself is supposed to take 28 months with the ship travelling at nearly the speed of light, which also means that relatively speaking, 15 years will have gone by on Earth when they finally reach their destination. I can't verify off-hand if that figure is correct or not because I'm kind of lazy and don’t feel like it, but I was rather impressed that the writers remembered that it would be no small task to decelerate the ship to more normal speeds when the ship comes across something the crew decides to check out.
As for the actual story, it's fairly good for the time, but as far as my tastes go, I found it kind of boring and preachy. You know, like a lot of episodes of
Star Trek.
It had some pretty high ideals, and there was plenty in there about anti-militarism and how humanity should all just get along and peacefully explore space and the like. The crew is pretty much just excited to be doing what they're doing, and the movie makes sure that they never really let up about it for most of the movie. Not all of the crew members feel the same way, thankfully, but unfortunately the majority of them meet bad fates, and mostly this seems to be to reinforce certain things the movie was preaching. For instance, the
Ikarie comes across an unknown derelict vessel that looks like a flying saucer. It's actually a little amusing at first, because the crew keeps referring to it as being antiquated. To be fair, the movie is supposed to take place in 2163 (exactly 200 years in the future), and they determine this ship to be from the 20th century, but still. I guess this is just an example of zeerust or something, because the closest 20th century Earth came to was the
Avrocar, and that little project died before this movie was even made.
Anyway, two members of the crew go over to check out the derelict, and they able to determine that the ship actually is from Earth in addition to being so obviously antiquated next to the vaguely iron-shaped
Ikarie. What's more amusing is that to press home how old this derelict is supposed to be, the people inside are all dressed up in 19th century western clothes and appear to be playing poker in an old style saloon. The only difference is that this saloon's second level has a control room in it, and it's here that they find the main stash of these strangely named gas canisters like the one that they believe is responsible for killing the entire crew of this ship. Why they'd have them like this is a mystery, but really this ship is just a thinly veiled slap at the United States. I say this because it's really obvious that the ship is supposed to be American, and the people on board are described as being paranoid and savage, which, let's face it, this movie was made in a Soviet satellite country. The bit with the nuclear arsenal on board was just the icing on the cake, though it also serves to kill off probably my two favorite characters and leaves the
Ikarie without its chief engineer (I think).
Oh, and speaking of taking shots at the US, one of the older members of the crew has a robot not unlike the one from
Forbidden Planet, and it's made fun of by the rest of the crew for being old and quaint.
This is also the point where the movie got a little more interesting for me, and not just because I was laughing at the attempt to bash my country, either. The derelict actually was the first clue in a mystery that makes the movie slightly less boring. It seems that two crew members who had gone outside to replace some component of the ship developed a strange kind of sickness, which also seems to have infected the rest of the crew. One of these two crew members dies and the second kind of freaks out and goes running around the ship, damaging equipment and injuring crew members. This is actually the in media res start of the movie, and it finally comes full circle at what's almost the end of the movie. The crew member is eventually talked down by one of his friends, and the crew can finally go back to the problem at hand, which is that all of them are being exposed to a strange kind of radiation, which is the actual cause of the sickness the first two had come down with. They can only speculate about a "dark star" that is invisible to them as the source of this radiation, and given the paranoia the second crew member displayed, they theorize that this is the actual cause of the derelict's crew killing each other.
Unfortunately for them, they can't think of anything to really do about it, as the ship's hull is only delaying the inevitable, and members of the crew are already starting to sweat profusely and act paranoid (in somewhat comical ways). The best they can think of is to knock the entire crew out because being unconscious slows down the effect of the radiation (somehow). The catch is, they might not wake up and might miss the mysterious white planet they now see as their only hope. Some of them also want to just go back to Earth, and there's almost a mutiny over this decision. In the end they go through with it, and naturally everything turns out all right.
Sorry for the spoiler, but whatever. Speaking of spoilers, it turns out there was life on the white planet and it protected them from the dark star by creating some kind of shield around the
Ikarie. The crew cheers, a shiny white city appears and the movie just kind of ends.
I've seen this movie described by some as being "intelligent" and "subtle." I'd agree to the first part, though mostly in light of the particulars of the
Ikarie's travel being consistent with actual physics as best as I can determine without breaking out the calculator and doing some math, which is kind of pointless anyway since it's just a movie. As for "subtle," I can't really see any evidence of that. For the most part I just found the movie and its characters boring and clichéd, so much so that I couldn't even keep track of who was who among the crew. Much like Gene Roddenberry's revised ideal humanity from the TNG days, the crew was pretty much uniform in characteristics and in how boring they were. Probably the most interesting among them were the crabby chief engineer and the old guy with the robot the crew made fun of.
As for the movie itself, I have to admit that the interior sets are pretty impressive considering when and where this movie was made. The exterior shots, not so much, though I suppose they might have also been impressive for when and where the movie was made. It's just that the "space" parts of the movie looked very unimpressive to me, and in fact "space" looked more like a black cloth with something like Christmas lights on or behind it. I'm not going to bash the models too much, but it was painfully obvious that the establishing shots of the ship flying through space were made by keeping the camera stationary while some stage hand pushed the model along a wire that it was hanging from. It actually made me wonder when the people making these movies first thought of keeping the model stationary and moving the camera to simulate motion.
While I am kind of down on this movie, though, I still have to admit that it's kind of impressive for when and where it was made, and that's actually why I'd recommend that you check this movie out if you're a sci-fi fan. It may not be among the best sci-fi movies as far as I'm concerned, but it's okay, and at the very least it'd give you a chance to see something from another country and another time. I'm also going to go against my usual standard of saying that if it has an English dub, you might as well watch it in that, because from what I understand the version of the movie with a dub not only cuts out quite a bit (which isn't necessarily a loss), but changes other aspects of the movie for the hell of it. One of the things it apparently changed was to change the name of the planet the crew was trying to visit to being the "green planet" with the lame twist being that this was actually Earth and that we'd actually been watching aliens. So if you're going to check this movie out to see what it was all about, you might as well see it in its original form with subtitles.
It's actually a little hard for me to rate this, so we'll just call the 4/10 rating a ball-park figure.
