Nebo zovyot

BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN opens with a seemingly endless narrated segment, featuring an array of spaceship models. The basic plot involves a race to put together a mission to Mars.

Originally a Russian sci-fi epic, it was bought, Americanized, and sensationalized by none other than Roger Corman. In typical fashion, the story was condensed and new scenes were added in order to heighten the drama and thrills. Corman knew his audience, and that the unaltered film would never make any money at the drive-ins.

Admittedly, American audiences at the time of its release would probably have slept through much of it. Even in its truncated form it's pretty dull., in spite of the dramatic music. That is, until the forced satellite docking. Cue the rubber monsters!

So, another Soviet era space adventure is Corman-ated...

Although bearing the AIP logo and giving the characters all-American names like Craig Matthews and Paul Clinton the credits give the game away by revealing that it's actually a Mosfilm production in characteristically hot colours bought by Roger Corman's Filmgroup who engaged the services of his illustrious protege Francis Ford Coppola (credited as Associate Producer) depicting an international endeavour to colonise Mars; which seemed a far more imminent prospect sixty years ago that it does today, with a couple of monsters thrown in that manage to be both absurd and Freudian in equal measure.

{Note: these comments and score refer to the Russian film 'Nebo Zovyot' ('The Sky Beckons') (1959), NOT the AIP film 'Battle Beyond the Sun' which was pieced together using the Russian special effects (plus a couple of ridiculous monsters)}. The Soviet spaceship "Motherland' is being prepared on a space station for the first journey to Mars when the mission leader Yevgeny Petrovich Kornev (Ivan Pereverzev) gets a call from another team (presumably American but this is not explicit), also planning on going to Mars in their spaceship "The Typhoon", who request access to the space station's facilities. Kornev assures them that the station is 'open to all'. During subsequent conversations, The Typhoon's crew, pilot Robert Clark (Constantine Bartashevich) and publicity man Erwin Verst (Gurgen Tonunt), are very leery about revealing their exact plans and seem flustered when they find out the Soviets are leaving a few days hence. Verst contacts his boss, who orders them to leave immediately, despite the risks, as all that matters is getting to Mars first (in 1959, the real 'space race' was just beginning). The Typhoon breaks station regulations and takes off without authorisation, injuring Motherland crew member Gregory Somov (Valentin Chernyak). The takeoff triggers an orgy of capitalistic marketing, as seen in a montage of Times Square signs proclaiming the success of the "Mars Syndicate" to be the first to reach Mars, plugs for Mars themed cocktails, and real estate ads pushing the sale of cheap Martian land (an unsubtle dig at Western commercialism and blunt counterpoint to Kornev 'knowledge for knowledge's sake' explanation for why the Russians want to go to the red planet). Paying for their recklessness, the crew of the Typhoon soon find themselves low on fuel and drifting toward the sun. They send an SOS to the Russians who, without hesitation, abandon their own Mars trip to rescue their rivals, despite the hazards of the meteor field the Typhoon has entered. The Motherland, with too little fuel to return to Earth or land on Mars, touches down on the tiny asteroid 'Icarus', the orbit of which has taken it near Mars, to await help from Earth. When an unmanned fuel shuttle crashes, all seems lost until Kornev spots a space-suited figure staggering across the asteroid's surface: Somov had heroically taken command of a second shuttle and delivered the necessary fuel. The film opens with a lengthy present day (i.e. 1959) prologue but just ignore the 'just a dream of the future' framing device and watch the film as straight, hard science fiction. The film is a product of its times and its blatant cold war politics (noble Socialists vs. grasping Capitalists) seems trite and dated, but the story is entertaining and the special effects and imagery outstanding (especially the 'Mars-rise' scene on Icarus or the numerous shots of the spaceships and the space station). I watched a sub-titled version, so somethings may have been lost in translation (such as the nature of Somov's fate). Definitely a must-see for space-opera junkies (or fans of Soviet-era cinema). The best of the 'space' scenes can also be seen in the ridiculous AIP opus 'Battle Beyond the Sun', assembled by one of Roger Corman's more famous umpa loompas, Francis Ford Coppola, or the even more dire 'Queen of Blood' (1966), both of which incorporated recycled 'Nebo Zovyot' footage.

Like most soviet films of the period (and I watched the original version), in has no action whatsoever. The plot is stilted as statues at the People's Economy Achievements Exhibition in Moscow, and the story drags its feet to no end. It is a typical tableau vivant aimed at kicking imperialist America one more time, and at showing Russians (but mostly Ukrainians, as the film was done at the infamous Dovzhenko Studios, legendary for its spectacularly bad productions) at their best and foremost.

However, this propaganda poster about how Soviets and Americans tried to prove to each other whose penis extender—pardon me, phallic symbol—is better, racing each other to Mars, of all places, is nicely illustrated with analog FX. The music is abominable, and is in place only in the scene of "space madness" of the one "bad American" they let out into space. The dialogue is absurdist and as ridiculous as the gadgetry shown. More than anything else, it reminds me of the old Chapayev joke: —Pet'ka, the apparatus. —Six, Vasily Ivanovich. —Six what? —Apparatus what? In some sense, it's just as silly as Gravity. Look how much time passed, and what has changed?

Nevertheless, content-wise, the film's narrow-minded positivism and typical soviet jingoism is set off by one truly Pynchonian twist, and you can appreciate it if you read Gravity's Rainbow. The film has its own Gottfried, and there is the Gottfried glorious moment there. A-and Gottfried's name in the film is Grigory.

I'm giving this movie a 5/5 because it's impossible to judge as it exists today.

NEBO ZOYOT is the proper name for a pioneering 1959 movie made in the Soviet Union as an official state-sponsored arts project under the direction of Mikhail Karzhukov & Aleksandr Kozyr. By all accounts it was a breathtaking, visually intimidating project dominated by special effects work the likes of which had not been seen before. Roughly telling the story of a Russian space crew sent to find out the fate of an earlier mission to intercept an alien probe on collision with earth, the movie combined DR. STRANGELOVE anticipating interior sets, functional looking science fiction props & space wear, and miniature model effects that make the George Pal & Captain Video oriented Americanized science fiction of the day look like laughable kitsch. Even the trend-setting science fiction work of Italian director Antonio Margheriti looks klunky and flimsy alongside of what is left of the movie.

There are reports of the original film running over 2 hours, a grand celebration of the forward thinking ideals of Soviet Russia where technology, human ingenuity, and tightly controlled communist propaganda promised a brave new world. Fortunately or not, Roger Corman anticipated the fall of the Eastern Bloc, managed to catch a screening of the film, and was talented enough to realize that nothing of it's like had ever been seen in the west before. Corman wasn't necessarily a "good" filmmaker but he had an eye for talent and bought the North American distribution rights for the film, determined to wow audiences with a science fiction spectacle the likes had never been seen.

Bringing in a young director/editor of promise named Francis Coppola, Corman oversaw a "redefinition" of NEBO ZOVYOT into a standardized American-ish Sci Fi potboiler about an astronaut crew sent into space to do battle with various space monsters. Corman had Coppola jettison half of the film's somewhat ponderous setup depicting the preparation & departure of the alien probe from it's home world -- one of the most visually striking sequences ever filmed -- opting instead for "new" inserted footage depicting the space monsters doing battle on the hull of our heroic space ship.

Sigh ... the result is more than a bit of a mess that manages to water down the impact of the original material, complete with an illogical story arc that is mostly explained in voice-over narration & awkwardly dubbed English dialog concocted from whole cloth and edited in to fit the on screen action (more or less). The monsters are absurd: One looks like a giant disembodied vulva bedecked with a row of razor sharp teeth, and the looped footage of space suit wearing astronauts standing around -- apparently under the influence of 1g gravity -- does little but elicit snickers of laughter from viewers who get enough pure oxygen every day. Somehow he made this movie look stupid.

Yet there are segments where the original Russian made vision shines through: The opening launch sequences have a kind of majesty to them that Gerry Anderson would never be able to quite achieve with his THUNDERBIRDS creations, the interiors of the space ships all look spot on real enough for Mercury program era technology, and the Russian segments of the film have a texture to them that is mesmerizing ... And make the inserted Coppola-made footage seem all the more absurd. Today it seems hard to understand why Mr. Corman would have advocated trying to fix what ain't broke in such a hamfisted manner, but that's 1962 for you, and fortunately the visual power of the surviving Russian segments worked to cement the film with a fervent cult following that allowed even some of it to survive for forty-five years.

Hopefully with a 50th anniversary of the original film soon coming a restoration effort can be made to show the film with only it's original Russian segments & appropriate language subtitles, like has recently been done with FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS and Pavel Klushantsev's PLANETA BUR, both of which have turned up on excellent DVDs that show the movies without Mr. Corman's interference. Retromedia shows the film under it's Americanized title BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN on a double movie DVD with the Italian space operetta STAR PILOT, and while contemporary audiences may not "get" the funky 60s approach to science fiction I cannot recommend it highly enough.

5/10