First Spaceship on Venus

I’ve just watched a most remarkable movie: First Spaceship On Venus. Then again, some people really disliked it! Made by Polish and East German movie studios from an early Stanislaw Lem novel (The Astronauts / Silent Star), this is an amazingly lush scifi movie. Very dull plot, but you can see that when it was released in the US in 1962 it must have provided the original template for the Star Trek series. Well, for its space flight scenes (captain, doctor, engineer interaction) anyway (I think Star Trek’s planetfall idiom owes more to Forbidden Planet). It’s still smarter than 90% of what passes for scifi movies these days. You can easily spot its literary antecedents compared with the single-plot bilge of serial genre TV scifi: radiation blast-etched alien shadows on cave walls, the tunguska blast caused by a crashlanding spacecraft, suspended animation, coordinated research, development and engineering organization, realistic gravitational dynamics, an inter-racial cast, the medical problems of weightlessness, an autonomous robot that’s non-anthropomorphic but instead bears an uncanny resemblance to the Mars Rover, and a resoundingly pacifist and anti-nuclear polemic.

Of course, it also has the original Icy-Calm SciFi Movie Asian Babe, Yoko Tani, as the ship’s doctor…