ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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What’s up with today’s Featured Threads?

A science fiction movie about the first movie landing. It’s science fiction because the story takes place before Apollo 11 landed, two years after the movie.

George Hamilton discovers that he’s got paranormal powers.

A space mission is sent to find out if a duplicate of Earth exist in the solar system.
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Countdown (1967)

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________________________ Countdown - clip


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co-starring JOANNA MOORE*CHARLES AIDMAN*STEVE IHNAT*BARBARA BAXLEY
Directed by ROBERT ALTMAN

Another filmed look at getting an astronaut to the moon, this is like an early version of APOLLO 13 (1995) and the HBO Series FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, with similar astronaut characters and their wives.

One could argue that this one is even more authentic because it was made during the sixties, right before the actual moon mission in '69, while the later films had to recreate that sixties atmosphere. Or, this is like a low budget version of MAROONED (69), the big budget film which involved a mission in Earth orbit.

In COUNTDOWN, they send a small habitat to the moon first, then a single astronaut is to follow and live there for 9 months or so. I found this strategy to be odd. It's also an interesting look at an early Altman (M*A*S*H) directing effort, where he already was trying naturalistic dialog scenes.

This was also an early pairing of stars Caan & Duvall, who would appear together in several more films, like THE GODFATHER and THE KILLER ELITE (75). Ihnat is the NASA administrator in charge. Michael Murphy has an early small role here as another astronaut and Ted Knight is a press secretary.

It's based on the novel "The Pilgrim Project" — that's NASA's name for this mission.

Though the film looks accurate overall and even documentary-styled in places, it falls short in the drama department, with some of the character scenes coming across as contrived and false.

Duvall, an air force officer, plays the astronaut who was meant to go on the moon mission but, for political reasons, policymakers decide that a civilian needs to go rather than a military man, so Caan is selected (the Russians are ahead of us slightly in this version of the space race, sending up civilians and they actually land on the moon first — sorry, USA fans).

This creates an almost childish antagonism between the Caan and Duvall characters. Aidman's doctor character is the worst, however. He keeps trying to convince Caan that it's too unsafe for him to go, but his reasoning is sort of like warning someone not to cross a street because there's a chance that they may get hit by a car someday. I just didn't see any sense to Aidman's concerns and found him to be quite annoying by the start of the 2nd hour.



The worst fault of the film, though, is that it's simply dull.

Altman does try to lend a realistic tone to everything but it's as if he tried too hard. It's like watching the day-to-day experiences of some acquaintances similar to your own dull day-to-day life — you can't really expect to get excited by such a story.

There's no excitement generated by the time Caan actually does go into space. There's a strange lack of tension, especially as it's the first time man is going this far.

Caan does encounter a problem when he reaches the moon (and, by this time, it was a realistic depiction of the moon surface, though obviously filmed in the U.S. desert somewhere), but it remains a boring exercise and ends abruptly at the point when we would expect a dramatic pay-off.

Still, this can be interesting as a version of the actual moon landing, just one year beforehand. Back then, in '68, it seems like everyone took for granted that the actual moon landing would happen very soon.




BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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The Power (1968)

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_________________ The Power (1968) Trailer


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This is a strange one. I have the Laserdisc, a double-bill set with Atlantis,the Lost Continent. I bought it about 15 years ago. It was finally released as a print-on-Demand DVD last year. The intriguing concept involves a possible superhuman - a person born years ago who had genetically skipped numerous generations and is therefore a man of tomorrow living today, with vast powers of the mind.

I've always been struck by the innovative, off-the-wall approach by George Pal to this sci-fi thriller; what about that music and those weird zoom-ins & outs? The Power — THE POWER!

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Recalling all the strange, off-kilter moments, I always want to go back and watch this after a couple of years go by in-between screenings.

However, while watching, I start to wonder why I was so worked up about it. I'm not sure what the problem with this is — maybe George Hamilton's bland hero or the slow pace in parts. Or maybe I'm just unsatisfied with the limited amount of time or exposition given to the superhuman villain (Michael Rennie).

I'm not sure what to make of the threat posed by the supervillain's character in this film. On the one hand he seems to be the most dangerous man, er, superman on Earth. On the other, he doesn't seem to be doing anything with his superhuman abilities except stalking & killing a small group of scientists.

He's been around for awhile — the actor is not a young man here — and whatever threat he poses, he'll probably pass away in a decade or so anyway. So the whole thing comes across like an interesting, experimental exercise in the power corrupts principle, yet not very substantial.

It's also rare in that science fiction films did not tackle this subject very much (see the Star Trek pilot episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before" about a couple of years earlier and in the seventies Carrie / The Fury as the rare samples).

Later, of course, we have been overwhelmed with the Marvel Comics super-hero movies of this past decade, so this film can be looked upon as a precursor to all those X-Men, Spider-Man and Fantastic Four movies. Other prominent examples are the obvious Superman films.

This film does have a rather large cast of well-known character actors — Richard Carlson is best known for starring in a number of sci-fi films in the golden age (the fifties). Earl Holliman offers a quirky yet slightly disturbing supporting role here. Nehemiah Persoff and Arthur O'Connell are the elder scientists. Gary Merill is an investigating cop, and watch for beefy Aldo Ray popping up as another menacing character.

As to the female roles — Suzanne Pleshette as Hamilton's colleague/girlfriend is gorgeous & sultry, while older femmes Yvonne de Carlo, Barbara Nichols & Celia Lovsky are in smaller roles.

BoG's Score: 7 out of 10

Powerful Trivia: rumored as one of Forrest J Ackerman's cameos in this one, as a hotel clerk, according to Wikipedia, but . . . no mustache.

Star Trek TOS actor alert: both Lovsky and Lawrence Montaigne appeared together in the episode Amok Time, as Vulcans.



BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969)

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___________ Journey to the Far Side of the Sun


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This is the one about the discovery of an Earth-like planet in orbit on the other side of our sun. A direct view of the planet is always blocked by the sun. Only, it turns out to be more than that — the other planet is revealed eventually to be a mirror image of our Earth.

I guess in this wild premise, the sun acts like some giant reflecting device and all actions on each planet are duplicated, as if looking at a mirror. All writing, for example, is reversed, as if looking at it in a mirror.

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There's a nice DVD release of this film which came out a couple of years ago . . .

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I don't have the previous DVD for comparison and there's no mention of the film being remastered on the DVD cover itself. However, the picture quality is brilliant, even stunning in places (I do have a fairly new widescreen TV and combo HD/Standard player which provide optimum picture, so this should be kept in mind). It looked great to me, considering this was nearly a 40-year old picture. It seemed almost like new — bright color, sharp quality.

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I have issues with the film story structure — the film is at just over 100 minutes long and the astronauts do not actually land on the other planet until the one-hour point.

There are some glaring plot holes if we are to take this premise literally. As one example, wouldn't the medical personnel on the mirror Earth have immediately noticed that the organs of the 2 arrived astronauts are reversed? The one injured astronaut was receiving intense medical care immediately (this is the future, with advanced techniques). Yet they only discover his reverse structure upon doing an autopsy.



The first hour is made more bearable for me due to the picture quality. Some of the scenes of the miniature landscapes and the interior sets are, as I mentioned, just stunning — a conceptually successful version of a futuristic landscape. There was an attractively coordinated use of color and composition in some of these scenes which now really stand out due to this new picture quality (again, I say it's new but I don't have the older DVD to compare).

BoG's Score: 6.5 out of 10


BoG
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)