It's the far future and space travel is commonplace. Contact has been made with far flung civilizations through the Great Circle or Union of the Planets, a sort of futuristic United Nations, even if it may take 300 years to send a message. In fact, there is The Council of the Space Agency in charge of receiving, sending, and maintaining communications.
The film opens on a ceremony in which the youth of the land pledge themselves to give their best under the tutelage of a mentor. During this ceremony Mves Mas is asked to take over the directorship of the Space Agency as the current director, Dar Veter (Sergey Stolyarov), in the position for six years, wishes to step down. He seems to have lost his way and is searching for meaning in life.
Veter about to announce his resignation.
Running low on fuel, the Tantra has been trapped by the gravitational pull of an Iron Star and is forced to land near a crashed flying saucer. If they can launch an SOS rocket there is hope that they could be rescued in 20-25 years.. The crew takes it pretty well, especially Niza who loves Noor. The situation is far from rosy, though, because they have used up all of their fuel. Unless they can locate more fuel they will be unable to launch a rescue rocket. Worse, there are jellyfish-like creatures that live in the dark and feed on humans.The Iron Star.
The crashed saucer and possible source of the deadly creatures.
It takes about 25 minutes of this 68 minute movie (originally 77 minutes) before the Tantra arrives on the Iron Star. After that we cut back and forth between that location and the Earth, if it is Earth because it's never mentioned. We'll go with Earth. The Earth doings lean towards the romantic dilemma that Veter and Veda face with Mas trying to develop a way to compress time. It is the adventure on the Iron Star that provides us with rich visuals and special effects. Niza, Veda.
Unfortunately, the human interactions aren't compelling at either setting. The film doesn't make any effort to explain the society we are presented with. It isn't expanded upon nor do we see how it works. There seems to be nothing in this world other than the opening ceremony, the Space Agency, an archaeological dig, and space travel. The ending is quite abrupt and doesn't resolve any plot threads other than that the Tartar has escaped the Iron Star. This was planned as a trilogy but went unfilmed when Stolyarov (Veter) died. What we're left with is a very unsatisfying climax. Plus, the talky nature of it with characters philosophizing about time, love, and the meaning of life this short feature feels like it's well over two hours. Throughout the film there are reminders of the enormous amouint of time involved in space travel. The development of a time compressor is aimed at solving this problem. The archaeological dig and the 300 year-old message from space seem designed to remind us that our achievements can survive for centuries and be of value to future civilizations. In effect, as the Greek believed, we live forever by being remembered for our deeds.The visuals on the Iron Star are pretty nice and I'm glad I saw this for those. In addition to the saucer there's another immobilized ship, a robot, some kind of gun weapon, and a landcruiser.
The Tantra.
The crashed saucer.
The crew of the Tantra approaches the saucer.
The robot using a sort of laser beam to open the saucer.
Piloting the landcruiser.
The landcruiser approaching the other trapped spacecraft.
The jellyfish aliens.
Sergey Stolyarov worked in a number of genre fare that should be familiar to many film fans outside of Russia. He appeared in COSMIC JOURNEY (1936), RUSIAN AND LUDMILA (1938), VASILISA THE BEAUTIFUL (1940), KASHCHIE THE IMMORTAL (1945), SADKO (1953), THE SWORD AND THE DRAGON (1956), as well as both parts of IVAN THE TERRIBLE. Nikolai Kryukov played Colonel Sebastian Moran in two different mini-series produced twenty years apart.statistics: Posted by ryanbrennan — 1:45 AM - 1 day ago — Replies 1 — Views 242