Nebo Zovyot (1959)

Wonderful character development!

Expected more

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Nebo Zovyot (The Sky is Calling) is a 1959 Soviet film about Russia and the US trying to become the first to land on the planet Mars.The models(Rockets,Space Station)and sets are impressive for late 1959. The film never made a clean debut in the US, simply dubbed into English as so many Japanese sci-fi films had. This was because the story had pro-communist messages and disparaged America. Being a Soviet film, the messages are all from the other side. The Soviets are cast as the reasonable folks. While the Americans are the reckless and impetuous. Fun Fact: Roger Corman bought the American rights to the film. He had it edited, dubbed and some new footage added. The result was his oft-maligned Battle Beyond The Sun. Footage from this movie also showed up in a couple of later 60s American B movies.

I saw this movie in its UK premier at the National Film Theatre. It is the original Russian version with subtitles. It was 67 minutes long and this seems about right for its slim story. I doubt if the rumours of a two hour version are true.The print was in decent shape, with only the occasional scratch, but the image quality wasn't great. I don't know if this was due to the mediocre quality of the original film stock, or was simply because this was only a 16mm print.If you only know of this film from Corman's Battle Beyond the Sun and are anxious to see it in its original form, don't get your hopes up. The special effects and production design are 'state of the art' for 1959 but everything else is quite poor.The story is very simple but is OK in its general outline.It starts with a writer being shown around a Soviet space exhibition. He sits down at a desk looking thoughtful and the rest of the movie is his daydream.An American rocket lands on a Soviet space station on its way to Mars. The Americans learn that the Russians are also planning a Mars mission and are ordered to set off immediately in order to beat them there. In their hurry to take off they accidentally injure a Russian cosmonaut.Because they have set off before Mars is in the correct position, they run out of fuel. The Russians heroically shelve their own Mars attempt in order to mount a rescue mission. The rescuers encounter a meteor shower that may or may not have some effect on their spaceship. Eventually they pick up the Americans but also run out of fuel. They land on an asteroid called Icarus, for no obvious reason. The Russians then send them an unmanned fuel rocket which crashes on Icarus, also for no obvious reason. A second fuel rocket is sent and does manage to land safely, but one of the Russians dies (you guessed it) for no obvious reason.This all sounds fair enough, but the movie makers had only the most elementary idea of how to tell a story in cinematic terms.The screenplay is very lumpy. It lingers on scenes of marginal importance (and interest) and then omits crucial scenes altogether, so the story jerks forward with scant regard for either temporal or spatial continuity. Basic information, needed to follow what is actually happening on the screen, is given in the wrong place or is too cryptic to really make sense (poor sub titles didn't help). Scenes frequently begin without any preparation and it is only half-way through that anyone bothers to explain what is going on. Sometimes they never do and the visuals are too opaque to fill in the gaps.The director is more concerned with creating beautifully composed images than generating atmosphere and tension - or even just telling the story. Scenes begin with pointless lingering close ups of people looking thoughtful. Sometimes we learn what they were thinking and sometimes not. They then wander aimlessly around the (often superb) sets with no point or purpose before clustering together and striking poses that might look good in stills but make no dramatic sense. The actors are left to fend for themselves.In Hollywood it has often been said that when a good director dies he becomes a cinematographer. If Mikhail Karzhukov was ever a good director he must have been dead long before this movie was made.The overall impression is that Nebo Zovyot is not a narrative movie so much as a series of 'tableau vivants'. It resembles an early silent movie, where the inter titles explain what is going on and the subsequent scenes are merely illustrations - except that here there are no inter titles.Interestingly, the other East European SF films made around this time which I have now seen in their original versions, Mechte Navstrechu, Planeta Burg, Der Schwiegende Stern and Ikarie-XB1, are all more or less the same. This suggests that Soviet Bloc film makers were working in a bubble with very little access to movies made elsewhere. Stylistically, they were all stuck in the Silent era, when Soviet film-making had been cutting edge.I know some people might accuse me of being culturally blinkered: trying to impose Western story-telling conventions on a film made in a different cinematic tradition, with different aesthetic values and artistic priorities. I have considered this possibility.They are wrong.PS: Many aspects of this review are even more pertinent to Mechte Navstrechu, the other SF film premiered in this NFT season.PPS: The British Film Institute is currently negotiating with a Danish company to release these old Soviet era SF films on DVD (hopefully with full digital restoration) so many other people will be able to judge them for themselves.

The American version of this film concerns a race into space and was assembled by Roger Corman who cut up the original Soviet film and then added some footage of his own. From the looks of things Corman took a ponderous and very serious film about a trip to the stars and made it some what less serious. Certainly the gravity of the performances of the original remain but at the same time introduction of the battling monsters in the final twenty minutes changes everything. Honestly the only real reason to watch this sleep inducing film is the two monsters which battle it out while the astronauts watch. The creatures are nothing if not monstrous to look at and possess forms that are rather unique, namely less than the less than veiled shapes of genitalia. Clearly the filmmakers assigned by Corman were bored and I doubt they really ever thought they'd actually get away with what they did, but there it is on the screen, who monsters locked in a vicious battle thats in actuality a less than subtle commentary of the male female dynamic. I don't think I ever really paid any attention to their shape for the longest time, it wasn't until I had it pointed out to me that the film suddenly became so much more interesting. Unfortunately the monsters are only briefly seen at the end, but in an otherwise somber film, their inclusion is enough to watch the film if you are a monster nut like me.

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