L'arche de M. Servadac

I'm a huge fan of Karel Zeman's films so it's hard for me to say which one I think is best, although I have a real weakness for BARON PRASIL and JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING OF TIME. I finally got to see this and it has good characters and it seems to anticipate the kind of comedy that Monte Python would later end up doing. Based on Verne's story, it involves factions fighting one another who end up on a comet joining forces to survive. As someone else said, the comet looks enough like Earth that if they didn't tell you they were on a comet and the comet didn't have dinosaurs, you'd think they were still back on Earth. When the dinosaurs finally show up, they come in herds and they look pretty good. It's some fine stop-motion animation but it seems kind of tacked on. Photography and music score as usual are top drawer and even the characters are likable if somewhat silly. Overall, there is just no tension or suspense. It's a comedy pretty much so you never really believe anyone is in danger. The animation is excellent as it always is in Zeman's films but this is definitely not his best work. I still think his best work is BARON PRASIL.

This second animation of Karel Zeman's of the fantastic world of Jules Verne's is not as efficient and ingenious as the first one, twelve years earlier, "Face au drape", mainly because the story here is more absurd and unrealistic. It is based on Jules Verne's most extravagant science fiction novel, "Hector Servadac", his most absurd novel about a fragment of earth being cut off from earth by a comet, a confrontation which in reality no one and least of all earth itself would have survived. But Hector Servadac does with a bunch of other people around the western Mediterranean, but Karel Zeman makes up a story of his own with smugglers, Arab freedom fighters, a lovely girl at the centre of things turning it all into a romantic love story, dinosaurs, sea monsters and what not. While "Face au drapeau" was replenished with splendid humor and great cinematography in black and white, this one is in color with a rather boring lack of humor and with concentration on metal utensils constantly being wrecked and spread in havoc all around making a lot of noise. Karel Zeman makes Jules Verne's most extreme science fiction extravaganza turn into a dream, and that partly saves the film from the blatant absurdity of the novel.

For some reason, I've watched this movie more times than any other! I had an English VHS that ran LP and it didn't matter. This movie is just so much fun. Zeman seems to have an endless bag of tricks that fit the story to a T.

It's a perfect sci-fantasy flick in just about every way done in Zeman's immersive imaginative way. A young "foreign legion" officer finds himself in a sea of conflicts as he tries to help the "girl of his dreams". All the while the world is facing cataclysm from a "close approaching" comet. Zeman is the master of what I would call, "impressionistic cinema" where surrealism adds immense detail to the story somehow.

The score is lavish and simple at the same time and pulls you in with it's odd orchestral intensity and has it's own surrealism. The action is packed with visual finesse. The actors are comical in the reactions to their situations and there lays a wealth of social commentary. Like the young officer's pointing out to his "lady in distress" a strange creature making evolutionary transformations before his eyes, only in the reverse order... Lot's of great "sight gags".

I've lost my VHS copy... too bad!

This falls a bit short of Zeman's best works, and the shortcomings concern the plot and characters as well as the images. Plot-wise, there's little tension despite the big scale; it is more a political satire than an adventure (already a "fault" of the story it's based on), and the characters stay flat and unconvincing, more like prototypes than real men or women. As to the images, the different kinds of animation and the real-life sets don't blend as well as in other Zeman's productions; the scenes onboard the ship with the ubiquitous hatching (everybody is wearing stripes, too) look as if taken from "The Deadly Invention" while many of the outdoor scenes resemle not very good B&W movies from the 20s; the animation of the giant lizards look completely different again as do the celestial effects.

Recommended for Zeman and animation fans; on its own merits this film is a bit boring.