Operation Ganymed (1977)

Truly Dreadful Film

one of my absolute favorites!

A Major Disappointment

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

"Operation Ganymed" is sci-fi for thinkers, those with imagination, and those who enjoy looking beyond the obvious. Returning Russian and American crew finds their hook up for re-entry strangely absent. After four years in space they seem to have been forgotten. After landing somewhere in Mexico, they must try and survive on Earth. Their challenge is not an easy one. Everything appears as desolate and deserted as the planet Jupiter which they have just returned from. Gradually, individual dynamics and desperation, overcomes discipline. Flashbacks in the form of hallucinations unfolds a tragic story of exploration, and a savage hopelessness prevails. Despite marginal special effects, the story is excellent. - MERK

First, to the two nitwits on here who posted single-star comments, I have to say four words: Stick with your tripe. Not every science fiction movie aspires to be STAR WARS, guys. OK? Not every movie involving space travel and astronauts will have Han Solo, huge lumbering highly detailed space ship model effects and Burger King french fry cartons plastered with the faces of your lovable Ewoks. Thanks for being spoiled brats when it comes to what entertainment you choose to watch, this movie was above your brainwaves, and it owned you.I always wanted to be an astronaut. The opening 30 minutes or so of this film are a mesmerizing portrait of the workings inside of Apollo era spacecraft. Realistic looking sets, costumes, banal technical dialog and the anticipation of returning to Earth after a five year mission to Jupiter and back. We didn't have hyperdrive in 1972 or so when the science of this movie was being developed. Come to think of it we still don't have hyperdrive, warp nacelles, dilithium crystals or Hiesenberg Compensators. Faulting this movie for rooting itself in the science of it's age is like complaining about cowboys in a Western for riding horses instead of just getting a Humvee.This film is daring, experimental, and alarmingly realistic. After seeing it I recall vividly where I first encountered the formula of astronauts returning home to an Earth devastated by a nuclear war: DEF-CON 4, a tasteless, tacky, exploitation hell of a Reagan era cold war paranoia movie that quite obviously plundered OPERATION GANYMED for it's source material. Where that film devolves into a geek show by the time we are shown nuclear survivors carving fresh slices of astronaut leg over an open fire, this movie maintains a grim, prosaic, nightmarish quality that is all the more potent for not going overboard.Make no mistake this is a LOW, low budget film, dwarfed even by the amount of money wasted on DEF-CON 4 let alone the Lucas/Spielberg epics of it's time (1978) that only a fool would compare this too. The ending is shatteringly ambiguous, perhaps cut short on the 93 minute version I saw but all the more effective by not showing us how it all turned out. Five astronauts return from a five year mission to boldly go where no man has still yet to go, and find that humanity has unforgivably extinguished itself in a nuclear holocaust that is never really explained. Instead of being greeted by CNN, cheering masses and adoring Hollywood celebrities they find decay, fallout poisoning, madness, death, and worse. It's like DESERT COMMANDOS crossed with THE ROAD WARRIOR, with even the former movie's Horst Frank in another standout role as a mission commander who refuses to give in to hysteria even when his face starts to blister & peel with radiation burns. Nobody ever said science fiction HAS to be pretty or fun to work, here is a film that proves it.So pardon my urge to wish to take a tire iron to the numbskulls who dare mock this movie, watching it hoping to see something else than what is here. The paucity of human kind is shown in our willingness to make fools of ourselves, squander that which we have and then childishly stamp our feet and demand something more. Here is a film that dares to disappoint the thick skulled morons who thought they were getting a happy fantasy of a boy riding a rocket when choosing it and ignoring what the story had to offer. For that alone it earns not just my respect or admiration, but outright awe. Try it on a double bill with the equally frightening, weird & ambiguous A BOY AND HIS DOG. I dare you.8/10

Although this t.v. movie was made around the same time as Star Wars, it has nothing of a space opera. Rainer Erler is more interested in the inner space of his characters. Five astronauts return to earth after more than four years on a catastrophically failed mission to Ganymede during which 21 of their team perished. When no one answers their calls, they perform an emergency landing in the ocean and finally get to a rocky desert coast that looks much like a strange planet. While they did find some evidence of life on Ganymede, they have a hard time doing so on Earth, until they surmise that the human race must have destroyed itself in a nuclear war. Their despair over the apparent utter futility of all that they have endured leads them to madness, murder and cannibalism.Some of the effects shots betray the movie's low budget (in terms of money as well as time, it seems), e.g. when in a supposedly zero gravity scene you can see that one of the characters is actually hanging from the ceiling in his seat because his hair is standing up straight. Other scenes seem to have been shot in a real zero gravity environment.Apart from looking cheap in some and dated in all places, this movie has many defects, not the least of which is the utterly unsuitable score. I still give it a high mark because it succeeds in creating an apocalyptic atmosphere and depicting people's emotional reactions to it better than many other movies I have seen.An intriguing presence in the movie is a beautiful girl that keeps appearing to one of the characters in his daydreams or hallucinations. She is played by Vicky Roskilly, an actress who seems to have made this one movie only and then disappeared from the face of the earth, at least as far as any traces of her on the internet are concerned. I hope she is alive and well.

This had the potential to be a great movie. I think the English dub was bad and the direction could have been better, but if you are sci-fi freak and like post-apocalypse type themes watch this movie. Operation Ganymed at times creates a chilling mood and that is what makes sci-fi a great escape from the reality a living on this miserable rock called Earth. (The planet is fine is just happens to be infested by scum called humans.)