Fortunately for mankind, the Soviet bloc prevailed in the race to space and, in the year 2135, a rocket ship named Ikarie XB-1 is winging its way to Alpha Centauri on a mission to find other intelligent life in the universe. Ikarie's crew is male and female, as well as multi-national (if not multi-racial), but everyone speaks fluent Czech. The venture is non-hierarchical -- there's no Captain Kirk ordering other crew members around. The space explorers flirt with one another and dance to the pings and pongs of electronic music and bitch about their space rations -- but the crew dutifully eat their wafer-like vitamin pills: no one wants to suffer from "avitaminization" as the subtitles tell us. Of course, things go badly wrong and, as it turns out, manned intergalactic space flight is a kind of nightmare, although the film intermittently brims with faux-Socialist optimism and, ultimately, all's well that ends right. Ikarie XB-1 is a 1963 Czech science fiction film based on the novel The Magellanic Cloud by Stanislaus Lem. It's rather bland and presents us with all the familiar tropes in space expedition shows, particularly Star Trek which it resembles to some extent, but one must take note of the film's date -- much of the stuff that we see in Star Trek and, even, 2001 has its origin in this movie.
Ikarie begins in media res with a character gone totally mad -- we can tell this because his grooming has gone awry (he has a ghastly five o-clock shadow and his forehead is sweaty). The man is wandering the stark corridors of the space-ship declaring that "Earth is gone!" and "Earth is dead!" waving a phaser (it's called a "blaster" in this movie), periodically shooting out the eyes of the surveillance cameras monitoring him. From this rather dire prolegomena, the film flashes back to happier days. The crew of Ikarie is enjoying their space-flight, a 15 year probe to Alpha Centauri (in which they will age only 28 months due to Einstein relativity factors). The crew members chat with past lovers by television communication and shower together in a facility that looks like a Planet Fitness health club. Everyone seems fit and merry. The men have square jaws and military haircuts. The women are attractive with exuberantly painted eyebrows and pale faces. The crew sit at consoles, watching inscrutable displays on monitors, and each manning about six identical, unlabeled buttons. Pretty soon trouble arises. The space ship encounters a derelict flying saucer. Two spacemen board it and find that the ship is full of corpses attired as if to attend a fancy dinner party -- this is a remnant of the bad 20th century when the forces of Capitalism thought themselves ascendant. The Americans (it is implied that this vessel is an American space probe) are transporting nuclear weapons in outer space and, due to some obscure contretemps, have killed each other off using a nerve gas bizarrely called "Tigger Fun." Accidentally, the two space-men from Ikarie detonate a nuke on board and that's the end of them. Next, Ikarie flies too close to a sort of Black Hole that's emitting deadly radiation. Two men who have space-walked on the outer deck of the craft to fix a motor are badly burned and one of them, Michal, goes mad, wandering around the ship with his blaster shooting things. (This story brings us back to the film's present-day). A strange sleeping sickness, due to radiation poisoning afflicts Ikarie's crew -- everyone falls asleep for 26 hours. But they revive, capture the marauding Michal and cure him, and, then, the voyage continues. It is discovered that some kind of force field is protecting Ikarie and, in the film's final scenes, we discover that this shield has been intentionally created by benign aliens living on the "White Planet". The aliens on the White Planet are assisting our heroes and have protected them from the deadly radiation. In the last moments of the film, the space ship descends through the atmosphere to the White Planet. The clouds part and there is revealed...'
The film is a bit naive and idealistic. There's a faithful robot named "Patrick" who looks a lot like Robbie in the movie The Forbidden Planet and is similar to the bemused butler-bot in Lost in Space. The space ship zips across a dark background painted with galaxies and nebula with a zooming sound. But the picture is brisk, zips along like the Ikarie itself, lasting only 88 minutes and some of the scenes are genuinely frightening and suspenseful. Production values are generally good; the acting is excellent and some of the effects -- for instance, the zero-gravity scenes -- are very well-done. Of course, there is lots of striding around in corridors that look like the inside of a particularly hygienic post-modern hospital and space-men also climb up huge spindly ladders in dark and cavernous voids in the Ikarie. It's impossible to tell the actors from one another -- some are older and others younger, but you can't remember their names. It doesn't matter -- the talent is all pretty much fungible. The film's political subtext is mostly invisible -- the movie is not that much different from a very superior and well-written episode of the old Star Trek series. American International bought the rights to the picture and re-released it as Voyage to the End of the Universe eliminating an obstretrical sub-plot (the first infant born in Outer Space!) and changing the last couple shots to completely falsify the narrative. (Ikarie doesn't show us the space aliens and gives us only a glimpse of their planet when the clouds part in the last scene; American International makes everything clear, but ultra-confusing.) There's a bizarre line in the middle of the Czech film: "We weren't told that there were things in outer space we couldn't expect," someone moans after encountering some unexpected dangers. What? If every thing was expected and known, then, what was the point of the voyage in the first place? The film is directed by Jindrick Polok blithely renamed Joe Pollock in the American International version.
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