Odisséia para Além do Sol

I'll admit that like many others here this is a movie I've seen many times as a kid in the 70's. :)

The concept and story are just wonderfull. My favorite type of sci-fi, the kind that makes you think and doesn't completely bombard you with special effects.

Speaking of special effects, without spilling any beans I can say if you like The Thunderbirds, you'll love the SFX in this movie.

Gets a 8 on 10 for me.

'Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun' is quite possibly the most underrated SF movie of the 1960s. It certainly has some flaws - especially the lack of character development, and a few ponderous sequences seemingly modeled on '2001: A Space Odyssey', released the previous year - but if you overlook them you'll find a quietly intelligent and fascinating movie that deserves to be rediscovered. The brains behind this movie were Gerry and Sylvia Anderson best remembered for their wildly entertaining marionette TV shows such as 'The Thunderbirds'. This movie was their first foray into live action SF and in some ways was the precursor to their 1970s cult series 'UFO'. Ed Bishop, George Sewell and some of the other supporting cast members went on from this movie to that TV show. The real stars however are Roy Thinnes, best known at the time for 'The Invaders', and Brit character actors Ian Hendry and Patrick Wymark. Hendry was the star of the little seen first series of 'The Avengers', and also appeared in Polanski's disturbing 'Repulsion' (alongside Wymark), and the camp classic 'Theatre Of Blood' with horror legend Vincent Price. Wymark appeared in another Price movie 'The Conqueror Worm', and starred in 'Blood On Satan's Claw'. Thinnes, Hendry and Wymark are all very good in this movie, albeit a little too cold and remote for my liking, but that is obviously the script's failing not the performers. I haven't mentioned much about the plot of the movie wary of spoiling it for those who have never seen it. Suffice to say it involves the discovery of a hereto unknown planet in our solar system. The less you know about it after that the more you will enjoy it. Overall, despite the script problems and one or two other minor criticisms I highly recommend this movie to all SF fans who prefer ideas over action.

Undoubtedly the best movie Sylvia and Gerry Anderson ever made. While falling short of Stanley Kubrick's contemporaneous "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun" has a strong, enigmatic plot and is plausible (apart from the novelty of its main premise) on both the human and technical levels.

I think that this movie succeeds most on the philosophical level, and it may be the only time that the Andersons have managed this in one of their movie-length productions (although there were certainly occasional glimpses of emotional and philosophical depth in their "UFO" and "Space:1999" serials).

I am glad that this movie was re-released on DVD as it will give me a chance to enjoy it all over again (for the first time in nearly 20 years).

A 'counter-Earth' is detected on the far side of the sun, prompting an ill-fated expedition. This live action 'hard-science' space opera was produced by 'Supermarionation' maestros Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and, although puppet-free resembles their popular 'strings-attached' actioners such as 'Thunderbirds' (1965): the miniatures are excellent in both design and construction, the scripts wordy and expositional, the story gadget-laden, and Barry Gray's music stirring. The first two thirds of the film is excellent, cumulating in a spectacular crash after which everything goes down-hill fast, as footage is wasted on trippy '2001-like psychedelics and eye close-ups and the premise shifts from merely dubious to outright ludicrous. The concept of a co-orbiting planet hidden by the sun has long been discounted (even if unseeable from Earth, gravitational effects would have been detected long ago - Neptune was predicted in the early 1800s based on perturbations of Uranus' orbit) and the follow-up premise, that it is identical to Earth, would require entire universe to be symmetrical around our sun. Although the story troughs when the focus shifts to figuring out how and why the astronauts came 'home' so early, it does sets up the final crash: more of the spectacular miniature destruction on which the film's cult-appeal rests. The pyrotechnics and model-work are outstanding and the scenes in space are imaginative and relatively realistic. The acting is generally good although, as Colonel Glenn Ross, Roy Thinnes bears the brunt of the disintegrating storyline as he bashes around looking a reversed writing and tries to convince people that he's is not mad. In attempt to distance this, their first live-action theatrical-release, from their juvenile TV features, the Andersons wrote in some 'adult' situations (birth control, marital strife, government sanctioned killings, etc), none of which add anything of interest to the story (the 'espionage' opening is very well done but the whole sequence belonged in a Bond film or a 'Man from Uncle' caper). Despite the ridiculous story and narrative weaknesses, 'Doppleganger' (the original British title) showcases the best of 1960s special effects (perhaps second to only to '2001 A Space Odyssey (1968)) and is well worth watching for the imagery alone.

Most people who enjoy this film enough to sit through it multiple times probably first saw it, as I did, during their childhood back in the late 60's - early 70's. It was one of the first science fiction movies I saw as a child and it made enough of an impression on me for me to remember it decades later. It was more thought-provoking than your average 1960's "space opera" and the special effects were among the best of its time (second, at the time, perhaps only to '2001' which came out about a year earlier). And although the people behind it were definitely influenced by Kubrick's earlier masterpiece, it contains enough original thought to be fascinating in its own right. Most adults who didn't see this movie when it first came out will probably be too critical to be able to enjoy it if they were to watch it now. As for today's younger audiences, they would probably tend to measure it by the standards of today's movies with their much more advanced special effects and simply dismiss the film as too archaic for their tastes. Unfortunately, this movie is probably destined to languish in ever-increasing obscurity as its original audience gets older and eventually fades away...