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SMC Pod #215: Soviet Sci‑Fi: Hidden Masterpieces from Solaris to Silver Globe · Secret Movie Club Podcast

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Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers, and welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 215, Soviet Sci-Fi.
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My name is Craig Hamill. I'm the founder, programmer of Secret Movie Club.
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It is wonderful to have you.
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Today, you'll be hearing this around April 24th, April 25th-ish,
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2026, depending if you download it right away.
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I am excited to announce that our launch will happen May 1st.
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So that is just right around the corner.
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And in the meantime, please go to secretmovieclub.com, create a free account,
0:50
and then go over to Community and sign up for that.
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We have been working feverishly behind the scenes. We've created our own social
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network for movie lovers and movie makers.
1:01
And if you sign up there, you get an account, which is free.
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You're going to hear about our events. You're going to get VIP perks.
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We are planning pre- and post-event at speakeasies, bars, cafes, restaurants.
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Basically, what we want to do at Secret Movie Club is we want this to be as
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user friendly so that you have your Friday or your Saturday,
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your Sunday of great cinema and then hanging out with movie lovers just taken care of.
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And we would love your input. We want you to be a part of it.
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So between now and when we launch May 1st, please create your account and send us feedback.
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You can email us at community at secretmovieclub.com. We are on the socials,
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so at Secret Movie Club, you can follow us on Instagram.
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Secret Movie Club podcast 216, which will come out next week.
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I'm pretty sure it's going to be a podcast about the Super Mario Galaxy movie
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and an interview with my children.
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I know I mention them all the time. If you've listened to this podcast,
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I always sign off by saying I love you, family.
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I am talking to my wife and our four kids.
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And we all went to the movie theater to go see the Super Mario Galaxy movie
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because my son really, really, really wanted to do it.
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And I said we were going to do it. And I don't know how many of you listening
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are parents, but it was a sort of exquisitely painful irony to me that I run
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a movie business. I love cinema.
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My whole life, I've just loved cinema. And we do, my family,
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we watch a lot of movies at home for sure. So we're very much about that.
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But as a family, it's hard for us to get out to the theater.
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One of the reasons being that we have a two-year-old and we have a seven-year-old with Down syndrome.
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So we just never know if we're going to hold the attention of the two-year-old
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or the attention of the seven-year-old.
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Interestingly, when we went and saw this movie, our daughter who has Down syndrome,
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no problem. She was in it the entire time.
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So it's my son. It was our four-year-old and our two-year-old,
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probably no surprise who got fidgety.
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Now, I know for a lot of you out there, you might be like the Super Mario Galaxy
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movie. And I get it, homie. I get it.
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But wait till you're a mom or a dad, buddy, and you'll find yourself going to see things like this.
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So hopefully it'll just be an interesting podcast. I have a feeling it's going
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to be on the shorter side, but I am going to interview all four of my children.
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We're going to do a kitchen table podcast, and I hope you will join us for that.
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I hope it'll be instructive. We'll see.
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I have no idea how much they're going to say. Okay, let's get to the main.
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A fascination with Soviet science fiction.
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And I would include Soviet satellite states because I'm going to talk about
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Poland today and Estonia.
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So not just Russia, but the Soviet Union, what was the Soviet Union or in the
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Soviet bloc after World War II.
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Their sci-fi movies have always had a different flavor than American and Western sci-fi.
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And I've tried to put my finger on what exactly I think it is.
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I think as a way to set the table today, I'm going to talk about this generally,
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and then we're going to talk about, I think, roughly 10 movies.
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I recommend you see them all, but I am going to point out the ones that I love
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that I think are masterpieces.
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As way of a statement, though, ever since I saw Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris,
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probably the most well-known Soviet sci-fi movie of all time,
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the one that gets played the most at rep theaters, if you're in film school,
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it's the one you're going to see.
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Tarkovsky's Solaris is actually, thankfully, blessedly, a great example of the rest of the genre.
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Often the most popular movie is not, but in this case, I think it is.
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And what I mean by that is if you see Solaris,
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which is about a scientist who goes up to a troubled space station that's orbiting
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around this planet Solaris or star Solaris, and there have been reports that
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very weird things are happening on the space station.
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And when he goes up there, he suddenly starts to see his dead wife.
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And somehow the planet is causing the astronauts on the space station,
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their subconscious, to materialize and come to life. And it's a great example.
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And Steven Soderbergh actually remade it. It was a very good remake with George
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Clooney and Natasha McElhone about 20 years ago now, I think, more or less.
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The nevertheless, I think the Tarkovsky, the original Tarkovsky,
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which is based on a novel by someone called Stanislaw Lem, who actually is the
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author of another movie we're going to talk about today, Pilot Perks's Inquest.
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But nevertheless, Solaris shows you that it fully embraced the conceptual aspect of sci-fi,
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which I love, but also used it as a vehicle to explore inner space or the psychological.
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And I found when I look at Soviet sci-fi,
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often the filmmakers are using that genre as a vehicle either for really intense
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deep dives into psychology,
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which probably should be no surprise given that culture birthed Tolstoy and
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Dostoyevsky and Turgenev and Chekhov,
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among other deeply, deeply Gogol psychological writers.
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But also probably no surprise as a way to smuggle in critiques of the government,
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of the Soviet government, the totalitarian, authoritarian Soviet government.
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And that's one reason I find the genre fascinating.
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Another reason I find the genre fascinating is just the simple fact that not
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a lot of these movies made it over here to the West.
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And so when you see them, they're not overplayed. They're not over talked about.
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They're not overanalyzed. And it really feels like you're watching the dreams
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of a country you know nothing or little about.
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And it's almost like watching a movie in a dream.
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And in Soviet sci-fi, given how much firewalling there was during the Cold War,
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you see these movies and some of these movies are masterpieces, like incredible.
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And you're like, how did we never see this movie? And that becomes a metaphor
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for all of world cinema to me, which is that if you do take deep dives into,
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you know, pick your cinema, Mexican cinema.
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German cinema, sub-Saharan African cinema, South American cinema,
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Chinese cinema, Hong Kong cinema, Japanese cinema, Australian cinema,
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any of the, you know, anything.
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You often find these masterpieces or these genres and you're like,
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ah, I want to show people these. I never knew these movies existed.
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So that's what I also want to
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celebrate today when we talk about Soviet sci-fi. But let's get into it.
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About probably the two most well-known Soviet sci-fi movies,
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both made by Andrei Tarkovsky.
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Although I think they're both, they're slightly different.
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Solaris is the one everyone's seen. We've already touched on a little bit. I love the film.
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Movies that really take science fiction seriously and imagine a future or space
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travel and really contact with
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a extraterrestrial intelligence my two favorites are 2001 and Solaris.
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And they're both very similar, both made within about eight years of each other.
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They both have incredible effects, incredible style.
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They're both made by singular filmmakers.
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When you say Kubrick and you say Tarkovsky, if you're a movie lover,
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the styles get evoked almost immediately in your heads.
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The thing about Solaris that's fascinating is how much Tarkovsky is able to
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rhyme outer space with inner space,
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transcendent cosmology with tortured psychology, and make them work as a totally
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workable science fiction piece.
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And what I mean by that is I think sometimes...
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When you see movies that don't have
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a big budget or they really become too allegorical or too metaphorical,
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you can tell that they're no longer really about tackling seriously sci-fi concepts
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like artificial intelligence or cyborgs or what our world will look like in
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a thousand years or space travel or contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.
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Solaris fully does that.
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You get this feeling on that space station of what it must be like to be up there, to be isolated.
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And you really become fascinated with what's going on on the planet or the star,
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Solaris, that this space station is hovering above.
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And again, no spoilers in what I'm about to say, the ending of Solaris,
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which is one of its strongest points.
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And when you see it, you're like, what, what, what?
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And it's interesting that 2001 and Solaris book do that.
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But stalker to me really becomes metaphorical and allegorical.
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It's about a stalker who's like a guide who takes people into a forbidden zone.
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And if you do these weird challenges correctly in the forbidden zone,
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you get to a room that will grant your desires and your wishes.
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But the closer you get to this room, the tougher it gets.
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And the more the room pushes back in a weird way. Great dynamite concept.
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And the movie is dynamite and visually fascinating.
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And one of those movies that shows you if you've got a dynamite concept,
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I've talked about this a lot, the sort of high concept, low budget movie. I love that genre.
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In America, those are going to be movies like the time travel movie Primer,
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the alternate reality movie Coherence, to name just two.
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I love those movies, the high concept, low budget. And Stalker,
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even though it has a higher budget for sure to me in some ways feels like that
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because the concept is so.
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Captivating that you don't really need much in the way of special effects or
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in the way of high production design. After that, Tarkovsky just sells the world.
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And, you know, you really are like, oh, this is really about human desire and wish fulfillment.
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And what does that really mean? Our ambitions are what we secretly want,
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what we tell others we want.
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It really, again, sort of defaults to psychology in an interesting way.
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And I think more so even than Solaris.
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But those Those movies are movies everyone sees. So I'm going to pass over them.
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And you got to see them. They're masterpieces.
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They are of the movies I'm going to talk about today. They are two of my favorites.
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So I want to be very clear. I love those films.
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They are two of my favorite Soviet sci-fi movies of all time.
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And frankly, you know, two of my favorite movies of all time.
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Please, please, please see them. What I want to move on to now,
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though, are movies you might not have.
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I watched, I think, about eight to ten others.
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You'll have to count them out. And what I did was I did probably what you do
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sometimes. I did some research. I found the ones that kept popping up that everyone
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said you should see, and I saw them.
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Two or three of them I thought were masterpieces, and I will definitely flag those for you.
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I loved watching all the ones that I saw. This sojourn to Soviet sci-fi happened
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recently because for years,
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about three or four years ago, or five, it could be more, I'm trying to remember,
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a woman who used to come to the secret movie club all the time,
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a woman named Anne, who was incredible,
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really friendly, so kind, great writer, animation writer.
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She mentioned this movie called dead mountaineers hotel
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and i heard that and i i don't
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know if this ever happened to you but i was like i gotta i gotta see
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this movie i don't know anything about it other than it is estonian sci-fi with
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a noir twist and i was like i gotta see this movie for whatever reason i was
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hard to find and i i didn't see it it was and then this new website came out
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streaming service called Classicky,
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which I highly recommend you check out.
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And it puts its focus on Eastern European, Central European and Russian cinema.
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And it had it. And this was like two months ago, maybe.
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And so I did I did that seven day free subscription.
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And I was like, let's do this. And I watched Dead Mountaineers Hotel and then
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Dead Man's Letters, interestingly named both of them. But.
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I saw Dead Mountaineers Hotel first, and it was one of those experiences where
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it was good. I really liked it.
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I'm actually talking about it. I could watch it again right now. It's a total vibe movie.
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But it was that thing where almost my idea of what it was going to be was better
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than the reality of what it was, but not by much because I did love the execution.
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The premise at Dead Mountaineers Hotel is this police officer is called to this
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remote ski chalet to figure out if something is going on there.
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And then there start to be some murders or apparent murders.
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And then people show up and something very weird is happening.
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And it soon veers from noir into science fiction. And it takes place across
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one day, one evening, really, from day evening to the next day.
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And I don't want to give away what the twist is, because to talk about the twist
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too much is really to give away the enjoyment of the film.
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But i i will just say
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generally it is a science fiction twist that is cleverly done because all i'll
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say in a general way is that the dead bodies or the murders turn out not to
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be what you think they are and that's and what they are is is really clever
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and really interesting and.
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The movie ultimately does another thing I really like,
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which is it's very clearly a satire or a pointed critique on the authoritarian
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nature of a police state,
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which is a very cogent theme to anybody who lived in 60s, 70s, 80s,
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Soviet 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, Soviet satellite states.
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It's told from the point of view of the police officer.
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And you think this guy's like our Sam Spade. You think this guy's our Philip Marlowe. And he is.
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But there's this clever change as the movie goes on where you're like,
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I don't know if this guy's helping of whatever this situation is here.
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And this guy seems kind of a blowhard and that's intentional.
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And I thought very well done and a very sly critique.
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What was funny to me watching it was it seemed like the movie was made by really
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talented filmmakers who didn't fully synthesize the storytelling.
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So the sets in this chalet are almost a little too hip and they don't really
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feel like they would be what would be in a ski chalet.
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It almost feels like what would be in Studio 54 Estonia style.
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And there is a dance, like a weird disco dance number two. But yeah.
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Those things the elements of the the
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plastic filmmaking didn't quite all go together for me and the
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ending was a little silly i have to say not the ending ending the last scene
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actually brings home the the authoritarian critique but the the reveal the twist
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and the climax of that reveal twist was a little underwhelming to me but but
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it's still a movie well worth seeing,
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Now, right after that, because I only had seven days on Classicky,
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I watched Dead Man's Letters.
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This was one of the greatest movies I saw of all the Soviet sci-fi.
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I think it's a masterpiece.
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I think one of the great Soviet films.
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This movie was made in the way. And in fact, the two movies I love the most
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were both made in the waning days of the Soviet Union.
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When Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader, loosened up the restrictions
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on creatives. And this may be the reason that these two movies are so powerful,
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because they are so subversive.
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So well, and the one movie, the next movie I'll talk about is Kinzadzad,
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another movie made in the mid to late 80s in the loosening restrictions of the Soviet Union.
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But Kinzadzad is a comedy, an absurdist comedy, a very subversive, absurdist comedy.
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Dead Man's Letters is a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
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I don't know that I've seen too many post-apocalypse movies.
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I don't know if this is going to make sense, but I don't know that I've seen
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too many other post-apocalyptic movies that were as unremittantly bleak as Dead Man's Letters.
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Now, that seems sort of a contradiction because you're like,
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well, any post-apocalyptic movie is unremittantly bleak. And you're right.
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But tonally, you know, the Mad Max movies are fun.
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They're action movies in some ways. and tonally other post-apocalypse movies.
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There's often an element of potential redemption in them.
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Dead Man's Letters weirdly has an element to that, but in the bleakest,
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bleakest possible ways.
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So the story in Dead Man's Letters is some kind of global nuclear event and climate event.
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You're not fully told this happened and nobody can be outside.
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No one can breathe outside. If you go outside, you have to put on a gas mask
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and a suit, or you're going to get radiation poisoning and climate poisoning. You're going to die.
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And so people are living underground. And the movie is told from the point of
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view of this little micro community of six or seven people still living in the
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catacombs of a museum. So they're all academics.
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And everybody is migrating to a central bunker.
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But the bunker is only allowing in really healthy people. So anybody who has
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a whiff of sickness can't be let in.
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And so the movie is narrated and our hero is an accommodation,
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an accommodation, academic, academician. I hope I'm saying that right.
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Intellectual, as are the people he's with.
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And his wife is dying and his son is not returned and from the outside.
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And so he's writing letters to his son throughout the movie.
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And what the conflict, such as it is in the movie, is he goes outside.
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He's he's wandering around some of these other satellite bunkers.
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And someone tells him in one of the bunkers that these kids are not going to be let in.
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About 10 kids are not going to be let into the central bunker because they don't
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talk because they're traumatized.
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They're like orphans and no one is taking them in.
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And the bunker has decided, well, because they don't talk, they're sick.
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We're not going to take them in.
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And our hero, our protagonist, basically has a horrible decision to make because
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staying outside of the central bunker means almost certain death.
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But if the kids aren't going to go in, what's the right thing to do?
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It's a beautiful horror, horrible movie. It's got a horrific sequence where
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he tries to find his son in the hospital ward of people who are dying or suffering
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from whatever this conflict, this war was.
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And it's a nightmare. It's like a hellscape.
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But not overly graphic. It's all done with sound and light and flash cuts,
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quick cuts and war footage and his performance.
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And again, no spoilers, but the last scene of the movie devastated me.
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And I thought it had some of the most beautiful imagery I'd ever seen.
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So, Dead Man's Letters. Kinzad Zog.
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Is this ridiculous sci-fi comedy that I loved was the Kinzadzah and Dead Man's
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Letters to me were the two wild discoveries as good, I will put to you,
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in their own way as Solaris and Stalker.
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Kinzadzah, it like, it puts American movies to shame in terms of getting the story started.
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Like anybody who tells you that the Soviets don't know how to start a story,
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Kinzadzah disproves it.
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This guy who's just sort of a middle-aged dude, says goodbye to his wife,
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goes to get something at the store.
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And this young musician, they see a homeless guy. They ask if he's OK.
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And the homeless guy says he's an alien and he's got this device in his hand
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that takes you to another planet.
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And the middle-aged guy doesn't believe him and presses the device.
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And they're on another planet.
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And that's like the first three minutes of the movie or something.
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And when that happened, I was like, this is amazing.
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That's the craziest thing I've ever seen. And the rest of the movie are the
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middle-aged guy and the young musician trying to figure out this absurdist planet,
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which is a desert planet with really minimalist, absurdist Terry Gilliam, Junot and Caro.
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Jenay and caro if you love delicatessen and city
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of lost children which i do and terry gilliam of
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course if you love time brand it's brazil adventures of burn munchausen
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fear and loathing in las vegas it has a kind of
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gilliam and jenay and caro feel to it but much more absurdist like by way of
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samuel beckett and these two guys who are kind of beckett characters from waiting
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for godot in a way wander this planet and they meet these two other guys who
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fly around in what appears to be kind of a flying trash can.
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And it seems like all they say is coo.
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But one way of saying coo seems good. And one way of saying coo seems bad.
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And then it just goes from there.
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And it's great. It's incredible.
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Weirdly, I for a while I was like, well, how far can you go with this concept? But it does.
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The sets and the locations get progressively more
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fascinating and hilarious it even has an intermission and
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an absurdist introduction to part two please check
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it out i then saw a movie that in english is called to the stars by hard ways
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uh it's actually called Per Aspera Ad Astra,
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which translates as To the Stars by Hard Ways.
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That one was from 1980 ish, more or less Soviet and has a big budget.
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And interestingly, oddly has a
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lot of resonances with the first Star Trek movie, you know, the one where.
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They go into space and they're communicating with an alien life form called Vigar.
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And there's the strange alien woman who's with them.
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And now it's not exactly the same, but they were both made roughly around the same time.
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Interestingly, the late 70s and the to the stars by hard ways.
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The basic premise is that the ship discovers a female clone alien and all the
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other clones are dead more or less, but she's alive.
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And they bring her back to earth and the
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lead scientist agrees to take
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responsibility for her to study her
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and so she goes home with him and he's got
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a young son and then it what's funny is that the movie plays like a summer blockbuster
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soviet style it's very intelligent but it's clearly meant to be pretty broad
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like when they go home with the alien there's a robot who's like a sassy robot,
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but it's clearly just someone in like a vacuum suit.
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And the young guy, and it's kind of a love story, but kind of not,
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he ends up being assigned on the ship and she sneaks onto the ship and they
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go back to her planet where,
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again, it becomes kind of like
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Dead Mountaineers Hotel, a bit of a satire critique on the Soviet state.
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There's like a guy who controls all of the natural resources on the planet,
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and thus everyone is suffering.
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And so she wants to somehow bring a revolution to this planet from this.
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You could read it either way. I'm sure if you're Soviet, you could read it as
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a critique of the West and of the out-of-control capitalists,
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too, who hoards natural resources. So it's not that the read is necessarily
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that it's a socialist critique.
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But anyway, on the space ride to her planet, there's like an alien that just
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lives in water and complains and conventions all the time and they take him
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to like a water planet i liked it i liked it a lot i didn't love it as i'm sure
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you can hear in my voice but i but but,
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If someone said we're going to watch To the Stars by Hard Ways,
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I'd be like, yeah, let's do it.
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I mean, I actually would probably compare it to Star Trek, the first Star Trek.
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I'd sit and watch that again. A little slow, a little kind of all over the place, but interesting.
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Pilot Perks' Inquest, which is also written by Stanislaw Lem,
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who had written Solaris.
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And it dealt with a character, Pilot Perks, who, as I understand it,
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was a character who showed up in a lot of his short stories and novels.
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And is a kind of astronaut slash Hercule Poirot.
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And this one I liked quite a bit. I just thought the ending was a little weak.
27:15
Again, I won't spoil it, but I was pretty into it for the first half or maybe
27:19
even the first two thirds.
27:21
And the whole premise here is there's a corporation on Earth that wants to mass
27:26
produce androids, basically.
27:29
And Perks has a reputation for such integrity that they want him to go on a
27:35
space trip on a spaceship, and he won't know who is an android and who's not.
27:41
And the company wants his honest opinion. And he's given carte blanche.
27:45
He can speak his mind. And so he goes into space and he doesn't know who on
27:50
the crew is human and who on the crew is an android.
27:53
And that setup is dynamite. I love that setup. And then even like the first
27:58
part of being on the ship with the crew is interesting because they,
28:01
of course, do things you don't expect.
28:03
They admit things or they tell Perk's things they're not supposed to do.
28:07
They start breaking the rules. But you're like, wait, are they lying?
28:10
Are they not lying? The last third of the movie or the third act,
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the climax of the movie, it felt like they were trying to do a little too much
28:18
and they didn't have the budget for it.
28:20
The special effects don't quite suspend your disbelief.
28:24
And it again becomes about a psychological traitor condition,
28:31
which is totally valid, actually. I don't think this is really giving away much to say.
28:35
The movie becomes about pride and arrogance and ego.
28:40
And I think that's totally always valid. And the movie handles it in an interesting way.
28:44
I then went, I thought I needed to be a completist in a way.
28:47
So I saw what was often considered the Soviet Union's first sci-fi movie made
28:54
before World War II, a silent film called Alita, Queen of Mars. I liked it quite a bit.
29:00
It definitely has elements of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, elements of Georges Méliès'
29:05
movies, elements of sort of Russian psychology, elements of Soviet ideology.
29:12
The premise, though, but I found the movie to be very strange and problematic.
29:16
The psychology of the 1920s in Russia is not the psychology of the United States in 2026.
29:22
So some of the things that were acceptable or that the characters do,
29:27
you're like, whoa, whoa. Oh, there's sort of like a vein of misogyny in the
29:31
movie, even though at the same time the movie views itself as very egalitarian.
29:35
That struck me as a bit like cognitively dissonant. There's a discordance there.
29:40
But it also makes the movie fascinating as a time capsule.
29:43
But the premise of the movie essentially is that there are these young scientists,
29:52
one of whom is very happily married, working on a spaceship.
29:55
But as he's working on the spaceship, he begins to suspect his wife of having
30:00
an affair with a local apparatchik who turns out to be corrupt and is sort of
30:07
playing, abusing his power on the black market.
30:11
And as this young scientist suspects more and more his wife,
30:15
he gets more and more mentally unhinged.
30:18
And he starts to imagine if they do invent a spaceship going to Mars where he
30:22
meets Alita, the queen of Mars, who also feels like it's played by the actor who plays his wife.
30:27
And so then the movie again becomes like, wait, is this really happening?
30:31
Is it not really happening?
30:32
I guess it's in his head. then he goes to Mars on the spaceship after kind of
30:38
a crazy thing that happens in the middle of the movie that I don't want to ruin for you.
30:41
But again, you're like, wait, is this fantasy? Is it not fantasy?
30:45
Is this psychological? And ultimately the movie feels like they were hedging their bets.
30:49
You like Soviet ideology seemed to be worried that making a sci-fi movie might
30:54
be too decadent or extravagant given the struggles may be very real that everyone
30:59
was dealing with post-revolution in the Soviet Union.
31:01
So it definitely hedges its bets.
31:04
But the set design, the costumes are very 1920s Russian theater in a great way.
31:11
And it did hold me. It did hold my attention the entire time.
31:15
And it was great to watch a silent film.
31:17
And actually, it did feel like it had a lot to do with Fritz Lang's Metropolis
31:22
in that the story itself and the message of the movie I thought was a little
31:28
muddled and I wasn't really down with completely.
31:30
But the experience and just watching the movie and the filmmaking aspects of
31:35
the movie were great. And that is Alita, Queen of Mars.
31:39
Then I saw a movie that also had been recommended to me like decades ago when
31:44
I was swimming at the Pasadena Rose Bowl pool.
31:47
One night I was swimming after I taught. I used to tutor in Pasadena.
31:53
And to exercise, I'd go to the pool if I finished up around eight because I
31:57
could swim from eight to nine.
31:59
Do laps. And this woman was next to me and she was a Polish doctor.
32:03
And we got to talking as we were sort of wrapping up, I think she found out
32:07
I was into movies and she was like, oh, you've got to see this great Polish
32:10
comedy called sex mission from like the late eighties.
32:15
I was like sex mission. She's like, oh, it's great.
32:17
It's about these two guys that get frozen. And when they wake up,
32:21
they accidentally were frozen way too long and they wake up 80 years in the
32:25
future. and it's only women in the future.
32:27
And if you're like, wait, that kind of sounds like idiocracy,
32:32
Mike Judge's idiocracy.
32:33
I do wonder after seeing Sex Mission if Mike Judge was influenced by Sex Mission
32:38
to make idiocracy because their premises are very similar.
32:41
Only in Mike Judge's movie, you wake up 400 years in the future and everyone's an idiot.
32:47
And in Sex Mission, you're a guy, a Polish man, and you wake up 80 years in
32:53
the future and everyone's a woman. And,
32:55
The movie stars Jersey Storr, who was in a lot of Christoph Kieslowski movies,
33:00
Camera Buff and the final episode of Decalogue and White from Red,
33:04
White and from Blue, White and Red, his Colors trilogy.
33:08
And I love Jersey Storr. And he's great in this, too.
33:12
Like Alita, I also found Sex Mission, like even though I feel its heart was
33:19
in the right place and the women are represented as being very capable,
33:24
very intelligent in the future.
33:26
And our two male leads are, especially Jersey Sturr, are represented as being
33:30
kind of buffoons, sexist buffoons.
33:33
But there is this current in the movie that is misogynistic, sexist at the least.
33:42
Where it's almost like the premise of the movie is these ladies just need to discover love.
33:47
And if only they discovered sex, it will be a whole new world to them. They live underground.
33:53
They have an underground society. The things about the movie that I loved were,
33:57
there were some very clever things like the sports.
34:00
There's some kind of futuristic roller derby sport that everybody watches.
34:05
I love that. The movie's very intelligent in that everyone takes these pills
34:11
to stay calm underground and actually mute their sex drive.
34:15
But there are people who now have snuck into the caves, other caves,
34:19
and have basically anarchist parties.
34:22
And so the world of Sex Mission is really enjoyable, really interesting.
34:29
And I was with it to the end. I liked Sex Mission.
34:32
I thought it was interesting. And I thought its heart was in the right place.
34:35
But I did also, I was like, huh.
34:39
It still feels like it was made by a very patriarchal society that even though
34:45
it's being enlightened in some ways is being,
34:49
very sexist in other ways, but sexist in ways that are almost like hilarious.
34:53
It is a movie we're seeing. It's probably a movie you could show if you want
34:56
to show a fun, I can't believe they made this movie.
35:00
If you do the like, you know, so crazy, it's good kind of thing. Just brace everybody.
35:04
Let people make fun of the parts that don't work. But it was,
35:08
it was fun to see. And that was Sex Mission.
35:14
And actually, I, I, I'm so glad I'm looking at the last movie.
35:18
Although I wish I had said this at the beginning, there was one more masterpiece.
35:23
Problematic for sure, but a movie made in Poland called On the Silver Globe.
35:28
It was shot in the late 70s.
35:33
It was made by the filmmaker Andrzej Zulowski, who would go on to bigger fame
35:39
and is known here in the United States really for possession with Isabella Gianni and Sam Neill.
35:45
Crazy horror movie that gets played all the time at rep theaters here in the United States.
35:52
Andrzej Zulowski, before that, made, he adapted his great uncle's trilogy,
35:57
the Lunar Trilogy, I think it's called, which was written at the turn of the 20th century.
36:01
And he made On the Silver Globe, but it got so out of control that the Polish
36:06
authority shut it down and he had shot 80% of the movie.
36:10
He still had 20% to go, but they kiboshed it and he finished it in the late
36:15
80s he didn't really get to shoot the 20% because there were some of the scenes
36:20
that he left unshot were just too ambitious,
36:23
all of that and they destroyed the costumes they destroyed everything so what
36:28
he does with the 20% he didn't film is he does these avant-garde.
36:33
Kind of Jonas Mekas type montages of modern day Poland in the 1980s.
36:39
And he explains what you would have seen. And it weirdly works.
36:43
Like it did not take me out of the movie.
36:45
And the movie is crazy.
36:48
It's a story about team of astronauts that land on a planet and only three of them survive.
36:55
And then they start to create a society.
37:00
Two of them do. And they're all of these ellipses. So you don't know if there
37:03
were other humanoid creatures on the planet or not, because otherwise you're
37:09
just led to believe that there's a lot of incest if, you know, it's Adam and Eve style.
37:14
And these two astronauts created the society that grows into like hundreds and hundreds of people.
37:19
But there's a third person in that first group of astronauts,
37:23
and he becomes known as the old man.
37:26
And he sort of comes in and out of the society and they're scared of him,
37:31
but they're fascinated by him.
37:32
Then the movie goes like gets nutty because across the ocean is a group of creatures
37:39
on the planet called shurns that are kind of like a mix between crows and grim
37:44
reapers and the costumes.
37:47
They're clearly people, but they are unsettling. They're pretty effective.
37:51
And then the humans, the women, have sex with the Shurns and create a subgroup
37:58
called the Morts, who are kind of like orcs in a way, if you're like Lord of the Rings.
38:04
But they're sort of cursed, damaged, hybrid creatures.
38:10
And the movie also really becomes a crazy interrogation of Catholicism and religion
38:19
and spirituality and the how.
38:22
All of the stories that have cycled here on Earth that are in our Bible,
38:27
how they could potentially cycle again and might actually be cyclical stories
38:32
that happen whenever a group goes to another planet and colonizes that planet.
38:38
It's really a provocative and fascinating thesis.
38:40
I have not seen Possession, but from what I've heard of Possession,
38:45
this movie is nutty too. There are some crazy scenes.
38:49
Zalowski is most akin to me, Alejandro Yodorowsky, who I love,
38:53
El Topo, Holy Mountain, Son of Sangre, Matthew Barney, The Cremaster Cycle.
38:58
Zalowski is clearly, determinedly, fiercely art house theater,
39:04
and that's good and bad to me.
39:06
Like some of my critiques of on the silver globe, the parts that don't work,
39:10
people will give monologues that go on for pages, soliloquies about God and
39:16
longing and sex and doubt and insecurity.
39:20
And it feels a little film studenty.
39:23
And it does like sometimes the movie feels like a breakup movie that you would
39:27
make when you were younger. We were like, I'm going to show her.
39:32
She didn't like me i'm gonna make a sci-fi masterpiece about our breakup,
39:37
and the movie does feel like that sometimes but it
39:41
is so inventive and creative and fascinating
39:44
and ambitious that even though
39:47
the whole movie doesn't work and parts of it are like what it is
39:50
still a masterpiece i was blown away by it i do put it with solaris and dead
39:57
man's letters and Kinzadzad as the most successful in creating worlds and really
40:03
delivering on what I view as the conceptual sci-fi component.
40:08
And there you go. Okay, I'm going to wrap it up there.
40:11
That is the end of Secret Movie Club Podcast 215, Soviet sci-fi.
40:18
You're not going to go wrong with any of those movies, but if you can only see a few.
40:24
Solaris, Stalker, Dead Man's Letters, Ken
40:27
Zadza on the silver globe you're going
40:31
to be introduced to a whole subgenre of cinema and it's
40:34
going to blow your mind and i hope i hope you like it secret
40:37
movie club podcast 216 will be
40:40
the super mario galaxy movie and my
40:44
kids thoughts on going to the movie theater on
40:47
movies i i i think it's important this
40:51
is the future guys my kids are two four six
40:54
and eight and we're going to interview them and
40:57
we're going to hear what their thoughts are and that'll be next
40:59
week in the meantime god bless
41:03
you guys fight the fight fight the good fight run
41:06
the race keep the faith please i wish you guys all the best make movies believe
41:11
in cinema go to secretmovieclub.com get an account get ready may 1st we launch
41:17
events uh i am gonna give it my all and uh i can't wait to see you again at the theaters.
41:25
It's time to go back to the movies. Okay. I wish you guys all the.